



Class XMi_ 

Book i 



Copyright *j°_.l 



tA : 



COMRiGSfT DEPOSJT. 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES 

Published and in Preparation 
Edited by Will D. Howe 

Arnold ....... Stuart P. Sherman 

Browning William Lyon Phelps 

Burns William Allan Neilson 

Carlyle Bliss Perry 

Dante Alfred M. Brooks 

Defoe William P. Trent 

Dickens Riclmrd Burton 

Emerson .... Samuel McChord Crothers 
Hawthorne . . George Edward Woodberry 

The Bible George Hodges 

Ibsen Archibald Henderson 

Lamb Will D. Howe 

Stevenson Richard A. Rice 

Tennyson . . . Raymond Macdonald Alden 

Whitman Brand Whitlock 

Wordsworth C.T. Winchester 



Ralph Waldo Emerson 

HOW TO KNOW HIM 



By 
Samuel McChord Crothers 

zAuthor of 

THE GENTLE READER, THE PARDONER'S WALLET 

OLIVER WENDEL HOLMES AND HIS FELLOW BOARDERS 

ETC., ETC. 



WITH P OR TRAIT 



INDIANAPOLIS 

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



Copyright 1921 
The Bobbs-Merrill Company 






Printed m the United States of America 



PRES3 OF 

BRAUNWORTH & CO. 

BOCK MANUFACTURERS 

BROOKLYN, N. Y. 



FEB -7 1921 

5)GI.A605684 



ci 



<o 



INTRODUCTORY 

The mind of Emerson was a searchlight re- 
vealing not itself but the various objects on which 
it successively turned. An intense and narrow 
beam of light would shoot through the darkness 
and reveal some object. Then it would pick up 
another object which would have its brief moment 
of visibility. The landscape was never revealed 
in any one view. 

The only way to know Emerson is to join him 
in his intellectual exercises. In spite of his per- 
sonal aloofness I know of no one with whom we 
can more readily come to a feeling of intellectual 
intimacy. He had no pretensions and no reserves. 
In clear sentences he told us what from time to 
time he thought. He made no attempt to connect 
these thoughts into a coherent system. For any 
one else to attempt to do this would be to misrep- 
resent him. 

In the short chapters which follow I have 



INTRODUCTORY 

treated Emerson as a contemporary rather than 
as a writer of the last generation. His thought 
is as pertinent to the twentieth century as to the 
nineteenth. Indeed I think that in many re- 
spects we may be nearer to him than were those 
who first listened to him. The prejudices which 
he encountered have largely died away. The prob- 
lems over which he was meditating remain. 

I wish to make grateful acknowledgment to 
Houghton Mifflin Company for special permis- 
sion to make extracts from their authorized and 
copyright editions of Emerson's works. Also to 
Doctor Edward Emerson for the use of his edi- 
tion of his father's journals. S. M. M. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Approach to Emerson 1 

II A Discriminating Optimist 16 

III The Opener of Doors 29 

IV The Parish of Young Men 40 

V Spent the Day at Essex Junction ... 47 

VI Friendship without Intimacy .... 56 

VII I Hate This Shallow Americanism . . 68 

VIII The Poet 75 

IX The Poetry of Science 95 

X Piety .108 

XI Thou Shalt Not Preach ...... 116 

XII The Lure of the West . 122 

XIII Emerson's Elusive Smile 133 

XIV The Quiet Revolutionist 142 

XV Meditations on Politics .158 

XVI The Candid Friend of England .... 172 

XVII Among His Books ........ 181 

XVIII Emerson's Historic Sense 197 

XIX Peace and War 209 

XX The Fortunes of the Poor 215 

XXI The Cutting Edge 223 

XXII Terminus 230 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



1 



EMERSON 

CHAPTER I 

THE APPROACH TO EMERSON 

"But, critic, spare thy vanity, 
Nor show thy pompous parts, 

To vex with odious subtlety 
The cheerer of men's hearts" 

SO Emerson writes of the Persian poet Saadi 
1 who "sat in the sun" and with smiling lips 
uttered his thoughts to whosoever chose to listen. 
He had nothing to prove, nothing to apologize 
for, nothing to lament. 

"Denounce who will, who will deny, 
And pile the hills to scale the sky ; 
Let theist, atheist, pantheist, 
Define and wrangle how they list, 
Fierce conserver, fierce destroyer, — 
But thou, joy-giver and enjoyer." 

We are so used to wrangling and defining, to 

1 



2 EMERSON 

building systems of thought, and with odious sub- 
tlety criticizing other men's systems, that we 
hardly know how to get along without these in- 
tellectual exercises. What is there to say about 
a literary man or a philosopher who cares for 
none of these things? 

To become acquainted with Emerson we must 
discard any conventional idea of the literary man 
or the philosopher. We must not become too 
much interested in his works. We must be gen- 
uinely interested in the things he was thinking 
about, so as to find joy in comparing notes. He 
was not a man of letters in the sense of a maker 
of books, and he was careless about the articula- 
tion of his thought, and so he is the despair of 
those who try to "place" him. 

There are those who think they can explain a 
man of genius by means of painstaking investi- 
gation of the town he lived in, the folks he knew, 
the books he read, the party to which he belonged, 
and the family into which he was born. A great 
deal can be explained in this way, in fact all those 
things in which he was like the thousands of other 



THE APPROACH TO EMERSON 3 

persons who were subjected to similar influences. 
But what about his genius, which is the one thing 
in which he differed from those who were about 
him? It happens that it is this difference which 
is the matter of vital moment. 

There are indeed great men whose difference 
from their contemporaries is in the quantity of 
their endowment rather than in its essential qual- 
ity. They think and feel as does the average 
man, they share his opinions and habits of 
thought, only they have everything in greater 
abundance. They are representative of the time 
in which they lived and we can not think of them 
as belonging to any other place or period. This 
is perhaps what we mean by a great man. The 
term is quantitative. 

But there are others whose genius is essentially 
timeless. They owe very little to their immedi- 
ate environment. They might have lived any- 
where or at any time, and the substance and man- 
ner of their thinking would have been very much 
the same. Ralph Waldo Emerson was of this 
order. In one sense he was a typical American, 



4 EMERSON 

more than that he was a New Englander, and his 
thought was colored by the experience of the 
passing day. But it was only colored. The tex- 
ture was not peculiar to America. That he was 
born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 
the descendant of a long line of Puritan preach- 
ers, that he was educated at Harvard College, and 
became for a time v the minister of a Unitarian 
Church, that he was interested in what was called 
the Transcendental Movement, that he traveled 
about the country delivering lyceum lectures, that 
he took a worthy part in all sorts of reform move- 
ments, and that he lived in Concord to a good old 
age — all these are interesting facts. If we hap- 
pen to be interested in Emerson, we like to know 
about them. But they do not enable us to know 
what manner of man he was, or what gift he may 
have for us. 

Indeed, if we take such facts too seriously, we 
may obscure the real Emerson, for he certainly 
did not take them very seriously, and was rather 
absent-minded in regard to them. It was one of 
his whimsies to profess a great contempt for for- 



THE APPROACH TO EMERSON 5 

eign travel. Concord was good enough for him 
and he could see all that was most worth seeing 
without wandering from the vicinity of the town 
house. But this was not because he had any un- 
usual prejudice for a particular locality, but that 
he had means of getting away from it that his 
neighbors did not possess. One place is as good 
as another to one whose mind is free of the 
universe. 

Emerson's mind was in the most literal sense 
cosmopolitan; he was a citizen of the world, as no 
mere traveler can become. The globe trotter is, 
lured on by the expectation of coming to foreign 
parts. Emerson did not think of any portion of 
the world as foreign. It was all of a piece. 
Wherever he happened to be, he was confronted 
by the marvel of the whole which manifested it- 
self in every part. He was like the citizen in a 
great metropolis, who leaves to strangers the tran- 
sitory joys of sightseeing. He goes about his 
own business, and yet he is gladly conscious all 
the time that he belongs to the mighty aggre- 
gation. 



6 EMERSON 

In dealing with such a person, the biographer 
is always more or less of an intruder. To Emer- 
son the inner life was much more important than 
the events and circumstances of the outer life. 
To the inner life as disclosed by himself, we may 
go directly. Thus only we know what manner of 
man he was. He was describing himself when he 
wrote : 

"There is an external life, which is educated at 
school, taught to read, write, cipher, and trade; 
taught to grasp all the boy can get, urging him to 
put himself forward, to make himself useful and 
agreeable in the world, to ride, run, argue, and 
contend, unfold his talents, shine, conquer, and 
possess. 

"But the inner life sits at home, and does not 
learn to do things, nor value these feats at all. 
'Tis a quiet, wise perception. It loves truth, be- 
cause it is itself real; it loves right, it know T s noth- 
ing else; but it makes no progress; was as wise 
in our first memory of it as now; is just the same 
now in maturity, and hereafter in age, as it was in 



THE APPROACH TO EMERSON 7 

youth. We have grown to manhood and woman- 
hood ; we have powers, connection, children, repu- 
tations, professions: this makes no account of 
them all. It lives in the great present; it makes 
the present great. This tranquil, well-founded, 
wide-seeing soul is no express-rider, no attorney, 
no magistrate : it lies in the sun, and broods on the 
world. A person of this temper once said to a 
man of much activity, 'I will pardon you that 
you do so much, and you me that I do nothing/ 
And Euripides says that 'Zeus hates busybodies 
and those who do too much.' " 

All this is quite foreign to the mind of the 
typical American. It was not characteristic of 
the nineteenth century. It is not easy to explain 
why Emerson should have turned up when he did. 

If, however, it is necessary for us to "place" 
Emerson, and to classify him, it might be as well 
to ignore the accident of his birth, and put him 
among those with whom his ways of thinking and 
speaking would have been most congenial. 

He was a philosopher, not in the modern sense, 



8 EMERSON 

but in the simpler ancient sense of a lover of 
wisdom. He belonged in a way with the men 
who in Athens liked to walk about in the gardens 
discoursing about the nature of the good, the 
true, and the beautiful. Perhaps the Greek dia- 
lectic might have wearied his more direct mind. 
It would have seemed a too roundabout way of 
getting at moral truths. 

I rather think that he would have been more 
at home with less sophisticated thinkers, let us 
say with the lovers of wisdom in the land of Uz, 
who gathered around Job, in his happier days be- 
fore Satan mingled with his affairs. It is in the 
cool of the evening, and they gather at the gate, 
and Job discourses on the pleasant mysteries of 
life. And people who had been bearing the heat 
and burden of the day, and whose souls were 
parched, came for refreshment. In their arid 
lives, it was wonderful to meet a man who was 
thinking aloud. "My speech dropped upon them, 
and they waited for me as for the rain." 

Such speech comes in sentences that are easily 
remembered. In the land of Uz people do not 



THE APPROACH TO EMERSON 9 

get their ideas from books, but from the lips of 
a man who has the gift of direct address. 

In process of time scribes gather these scattered 
sentences into volumes, and we have collections 
of what the Hebrew scholars call Wisdom Litera- 
ture. So we have the Proverbs, The Wisdom of 
Solomon, and the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach. 
They contain the observations and the medita- 
tions of men who had found time for such things. 
They are enjoyed by those of kindred temper. 

Emerson's essays belong to this Wisdom Lit- 
erature. They are gnomic, that is to say, they 
consist of pregnant sentences. Their arrange- 
ment is a matter largely of accident. 

Had he lived in the land of Uz, Emerson would 
have uttered these sentences to a little group at 
the city gate, and trusted to their memories for 
the preservation of what was of value. Being an 
American in the nineteenth century, he jotted 
them down in his note-book when they occurred 
to him, and then as opportunity offered presented 
them to groups of his fellow-citizens, gathered on 
winter evenings in poorly ventilated halls. All 



10 EMERSON 

the way from Massachusetts to Iowa he found his 
audience, and gave them freely of his best. Then 
acting as his own scribe, he gathered the sentences 
together into the form familiar to us. 

To get his general point of view, read the ninth 
chapter of Proverbs: 

"Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath 
hewn out her seven pillars; she hath killed her 
beasts ; she hath mingled her wine ; she hath also 
furnished her table. She hath sent forth her 
maidens: she crieth upon the highest places of 
the city. . . . Come, eat of my bread, and 
drink of the wine which I have mingled/* 

It is all very simple and natural. L Wisdom is 
the builder. She builds according to her own 
plan, and when the house is furnished, she makes 
her feast and sends forth her maidens with the 
invitation to her table. 

And the thinker, who is he? He is not the 
architect, he did not plan the building. Nor is 
he the high priest ordering the sacrifice. He does 



THE APPROACH TO EMERSON 11 

not take himself so solemnly. He is only one of 
the invited guests, who has not lost the sense of 
wondering curiosity. He can not churlishly sit 
down to the feast without being introduced to the 
hostess. He wanders about among all the mar- 
vels, seeking her. For, says the son of Sirach, 
"It is the chief point of Wisdom to know whose 
gift it is." 

In the nineteenth century Ralph Waldo Emer- 
son lived a life that was as simple as that of the 
antique philosophers. He practised an art which 
has been thought to be lost — the art of medita- 
tion. The fruit of his meditations he offered to 
all those whom it might concern. 

Emerson was a man thinking. There is no 
Emersonian system of philosophy, only an Emer- 
sonian way of looking at things, and that is per- 
fectly simple. There is a legal phrase, "without 
prejudice/' which is used of parties to a contro- 
versy, implying that should the negotiations fail, 
nothing that has passed shall be taken advantage 
of thereafter. Thus should the defendant offer 
without prejudice to pay half the claim, the plain- 



12 EMERSON 

tiff can not consider this offer as an admission of 
his having the right to some payment. 

To read the words of Emerson in the spirit in 
which they were written, we must remember to 
take what he says without prejudice. Each sen- 
tence makes its own appeal, and it is for us to 
determine whether it rings true or false. But we 
must not hold him responsible for the inferences 
which we may draw. He was not uttering 
oracles, though the form might sometimes seem 
oracular. He aimed to challenge us rather than 
to secure docile acceptance of his ideas. He did 
not attempt at any one time to state the whole 
truth. He preferred to state a half truth in such 
a manner that we should be ready to supply the 
other half. Instead of avoiding extreme opin- 
ions, he wished to have them confront each other 
in the same mind. 

"This is true, that other is true. But our geom- 
etry cannot span the extreme points and reconcile 
them. What to do? By obeying each thought 
frankly, by harping, or if you will, pounding on 



THE APPROACH TO EMERSON 13 

each string, we learn at last its power. By the 
same obedience to others' thoughts, we learn 
theirs and then comes some reasonable hope of 
harmonizing them." 

The method which he recommended and which 
he followed was in the highest degree unsyste- 
matic. It was "the method of taking up in turn 
each of the leading topics which belong to our 
scheme of human life, and by stating all that is 
agreeable to experience on one hand, and doing 
the same justice to the opposing facts, the true 
limitations will appear. Any excess of emphasis 
on one part would be corrected and a just bal- 
ance made/' 

In other words, Emerson would never assume 
the cool judicial attitude in regard to any vital 
question. He would speak as an advocate of the 
side which for the moment seemed to him most 
important. But he would always reserve the 
right to state the other side just as strongly. Not 
only did he claim the right to take both sides, but 
also to change the subject as often as he liked. 



14 EMERSON 

He believed that there were certain general prin- 
ciples which were applicable to all the various pro- 
fessions and callings. One who was in Milton's 
phrase "a skillful considerer of human things" 
had a right to express his opinions, for in spite 
of all the modern division of labor, life is still 
made up of a few simple elements. 

In the following chapters I have made no at- 
tempt to harmonize the views of Emerson. That 
would only obscure the sharp outlines of each 
separate view. One who would know Emerson 
must not read his word with the docility of a 
mere disciple. He must rather take it as a game 
and match his wits against a quick antagonist. 

It is the mental attitude which that unconven- 
tional sixteenth-century preacher, Bishop Hugh 
Latimer, sought to inspire in his congregation. In 
his famous Sermon on the Cards, he challenged 
his congregation to play a game of cards, which 
in those days was called "Triumph." 

Quoth Latimer : "Whereas, ye are wont to cele- 
brate Christmas in playing at cards, I intend by 
God's grace to deal unto you Christ's cards. The 



THE APPROACH TO EMERSON IS 

game we shall play at shall be called the triumph 
(trump) which if it be well played, he that deal- 
eth shall win, the players shall likewise win, and 
the standers and lookers on shall do the same, in- 
asmuch that there is no man that is willing to 
play at this Triumph with these cards but that 
they shall all be winners, and no losers. Let 
therefore every Christian man and woman play 
at these cards, that they may have and obtain the 
triumph; you must mark also that the triumph 
must apply to fetch home with him all the other 
cards whatsoever suit they be of. Now then 
take ye this first card which must appear and be 
shewed to you as followed." 

In some such way Emerson invites us to join 
in his favorite recreation. It is the free play of 
thought in which "he that dealeth shall win, the 
players shall likewise win and the standers and 
lookers on shall do the same." j 



CHAPTER II 

A DISCRIMINATING OPTIMIST 

<€ I am a willozv of the wilderness, 
Loving the wind that bent me! 3 

ONE of the most familar terms of reproach 
in these days is "Victorian." It is used by 
clever literary persons who have rebelled against 
the standards of their immediate predecessors. 
It implies a certain smugness and self-satisfaction 
which is very irritating to persons who are con- 
scious of the cruel realities of this unfinished 
world. The Victorians are supposed to have been 
incorrigible optimists who mistook the Foofs 
Paradise in which they lived for the final resting 
place of humanity. They were worshipers of the 
respectabilities, and were content with the cant of 
liberalism as their fathers had been content with 
the cant of Toryism. 

To-day, however, we are taught that it is our 
duty to face the grimmest realities, and not to 

16 



A DISCRIMINATING OPTIMIST 17 

flinch when we see something that is ugly and 
threatening. We must see how the other half 
lives, and we must free ourselves from amiable 
delusions. 

In turning from the work of our painfully sin- 
cere realists to Emerson, the first impression is 
that we are going back to that discredited state 
of mind, the early Victorian optimism. For 
Emerson faces the existing world with a smiling 
face. He takes for granted that there is a friend- 
liness in its laws, and that the ultimate reality is 
not to be feared. He has a frank predilection for 
beauty and does not feel it his duty to feed his 
imagination on what is ugly and unwholesome. 
He is always glad to be alive, and glad to find so 
many other creatures alive at the same time. 
Sometimes he has a too debonair way of making 
light of the evils that are encountered by earnest 
people. 

But those who look upon the optimism of 
Emerson as a part of the conventionalism of his 
time are, I think, superficial in their judgments. 
In the first place, he was not a Victorian, but an 



18 EMERSON 

American, who was not under the spell of the 
good queen and her court. No one was less dis- 
posed to imitate the literary conventions then 
dominant in England. He was no more a Vic- 
torian than was Abraham Lincoln. There was 
nothing smug in his optimism. He was not an 
apologist for the existing state of things, nor in- 
terested in proving that this is the best of all 
possible worlds. He did not try to make himself 
agreeable by calling evil good. He recognized the 
existence of an enormous number of bad and 
cruel things. "Nature as we know her is no 
saint/' 

He taught that nature does not coddle us, nor 
provide ready-made houses or clothes. She leaves 
us to make these things for ourselves. And the 
process of experiment is never an easy one. It is 
a long and tedious way by which we travel toward 
truth. Nature does not tell us what is good for 
us; to discover this is part of our experience. 

"I compared notes with one of my friends wfio 
expects everything of the Universe and is disap- 



A DISCRIMINATING OPTIMIST 19 

pointed, and I found that I began at the other 
extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full 
of thanks for moderate blessings." 

So far from denying or seeking to hide the 
darker and more painful aspects of the world, he 
admitted them and placed them where they be- 
long, at the beginning. They belong to the realm 
of chaos and night. 

But the outstanding fact is that there has been 
a gradual emergence from chaos. The existence 
of man as a reasoning creature becomes more 
wonderful as we think of the odds against it. No 
good thing can be had without effort. 

But the real question is, "Is the effort worth 
while ?" You may say that it is not. You do not 
know whether or not you shall succeed, and there- 
fore you will not try. 

Emerson declares that the effort is most glor- 
iously worth while. It reveals the joy of creation. 

"A man is a golden impossibility. Power keeps 
quite another road than the turnpike of choice 
and will, namely, the subterranean and invisible 



20 EMERSON 

tunnels and channels of life. Life is a series of 
surprises and would not be worth taking and 
keeping if it were not. . . . Nature hates cal- 
culators, her methods are saltatory and impulsive. 
. . . The mind goes antagonizing on, and never 
prospers but by fits. We thrive on casualties. 
.... Every man is an impossibility till he is 
born, everything is impossible till we see it a 
success/' 

At this point it would be well to lay down 
Emerson's essay on Experience and do a little 
meditating on the words, "the mind goes antago- 
nizing on." 

Here is a philosophy that goes behind the old 
dispute between the optimist and the pessimist. 
The ordinary optimist tries to prove that there is 
no real antagonism between the facts of nature 
and the ideals of the human soul. Everything is 
exquisitely fitted to produce happiness. The pessi- 
mist denies this and insists on the flagrant opposi- 
tion between what is and what ought to be. He 



A DISCRIMINATING OPTIMIST 21 

arranges a deadly parallel between the world of 
the ideals and the world of hard reality. 

Emerson answers that there is an antagonism. 
The human spirit must not be bullied by that 
which lies beneath it. It must assert its sov- 
ereignty, and in its resistance it makes the dis- 
covery of its power. It goes "antagonizing on." 
That is the way of the conqueror. 

"The essence of tragedy does not seem to me 
to lie in any list of particular evils. After we 
have enumerated famine, fever, inaptitude, muti- 
lation, rack, madness and loss of friends, we have 
not yet included the proper tragic element, which 
is Terror, and which does not respect definite 
evils but indefinite; an ominous spirit which 
haunts the afternoon and night, idleness and soli- 
tude." 

A low haggard spirit sits by our side, "casting 
the fashion of uncertain evils, a sinister presenti- 
ment, a pow r er of the imagination to disclose 
things orderly and cheerful and show them in 



22 EMERSON 

startling array. Hark, what sounds on the night 
wind? the cry of murder in that friendly house, 
see those marks of stamping feet, of hidden riot. 
The whisper overhead, the detected glance, the 
glare of malignity, ungrounded fears, suspicions, 
half knowledge and mistakes, darken the brow 
and chill the heart of man. And accordingly it 
is natures not clear, nor of quick and steady per- 
ceptions, but imperfect characters from which 
something is hidden that all others see, that suffer 
most from these causes. In those persons who 
move the profoundest pity, tragedy seems to con- 
sist in temperament, not in events. There are 
people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure 
is not strong enough, and they crave pain, Mi- 
thridatic stomachs which must be fed on poi- 
soned bread, natures so downed that no prosperity 
can soothe their ragged and dishevelled desola- 
tion. They mishear and misbelieve, they suspect 
and dread. They handle every nettle, and tread 
on every snake in the meadow/' 

It is here that Emerson made his stand. It is 
not necessary for us to apologize for facts or to 



A DISCRIMINATING OPTIMIST 23 

attempt to vindicate Eternal Providence. Events 
come and we must face them. But the Terror 
we must not yield to, this we can overcome. 
There is a health of the spirit which may be cul- 
tivated and which makes us immune to evil in- 
fluences. 

The optimism of Emerson was not to be ex- 
pressed in the phrase, "looking at the bright side 
of things." That is the lazy man's optimism. 
There is a homelier phrase, "making the best of 
it." Let the circumstances be what they may, the 
brave man accepts them resolved to make the best 
of them. And the surprise is that when he puts 
all his strength into the task, the result is some- 
thing better than he had planned. Even when 
worst has come to worst, the hero turns upon the 
Hostile powers and finds the Best which he has 
worshiped afar now realized in his own will. 

"Trembler, do not whine and chide, 
Art thou not also real ? 
Why shouldst thou stoop to poor excuse ; 
Turn on the accuser roundly, say, 
'Here am I, here will I abide 



24 EMERSON 

Forever to myself soothfast. 

Go thou, sweet Heaven, or at thy pleasure 

stay!' 
Already Heaven with thee its lot has cast." 

The most complete expression of Emerson's 
discriminating optimism can be found in his essay 
on Fate. Here he states the argument of the 
pessimist in the strongest terms. There are forces 
at work which bring pain and loss. There are 
laws which we can not control. There are trag- 
edies which are inevitable. But the good man 
confronts the evil fate. Emerson believed that 
the result of that conflict was the creation of a 
higher good than had before been perceived. The 
struggle with Fate produced power. 

"Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind, and 
morals — in race, in retardations of strata, and in 
thought and character as well. It is everywhere 
bound or limitation. But Fate has its lord ; limi- 
tation its limits ; is different seen from above and 
from below ; from within and from without. For, 
though Fate is immense, so is power, which is the 



A DISCRIMINATING OPTIMIST 25 

other fact in the dual world, immense. If Fate 
follows and limits power, power attends and an- 
tagonizes Fate. We must respect Fate as natural 
history, but there is more than natural history. 
For who and what is this criticism that pries into 
the matter? Man is not order of nature, sack 
and sack, belly and members, link in a chain, nor 
any ignominious baggage, but a stupendous an- 
tagonism, a dragging together of the poles of 
the universe. He betrays his relation to what is 
below him — thick-skulled, small-brained, fishy, 
quadrumanous — quadruped ill-disguised, hardly 
escaped into biped, and has paid for the new 
powers by loss of some of the old ones. But the 
lightning which explodes and fashions planets, 
maker of planet and suns, is in him. On one side, 
elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock- 
ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and, on 
the other part, thought, the spirit which composes 
and decomposes nature — here they are, side by 
side, God and devil, mind and matter, king and 
conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully to- 
gether in the eye and brain of every man. 



26 EMERSON 

"Nor can he blink the free-will. To hazard 
the contradiction — freedom is necessary. If you 
please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and 
say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the 
freedom of man. For ever wells up the impulse 
of choosing and acting in the soul. Intellect an- 
nuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. 
And though nothing is more disgusting than the 
crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, 
and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some 
paper preamble like a 'Declaration of Indepen- 
dence/ or the statute right to vote, by those who 
have never dared to think or to act, yet it is 
wholesome to man to look not at Fate, but the 
other way: the practical view is the other. His 
sound relation to these facts is to use and com- 
mand, not to cringe to them. 'Look not on Na- 
ture, for her name is fatal/ said the oracle. The 
too much contemplation of these limits induces 
meanness. They who talk much of destiny, their 
birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, 
and invite the evils they fear. 



A DISCRIMINATING OPTIMIST 27 

"I cited the instinctive and heroic races as 
proud believers in Destiny. They conspire with 
it; a loving resignation is with the event. But 
the dogma makes a different impression, when 
it is held by the weak and lazy. 'Tis weak and 
vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The 
right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to 
the loftiness of nature. Rude and invincible ex- 
cept by themselves are the elements. So let man 
be. Let him empty his breast of his windy con- 
ceits, and show his lordship by manners and deeds 
on the scale of nature. Let him hold his purpose 
as with the tug of gravitation. No power, no 
persuasion, no bribe, shall make him give up his 
point. A man ought to compare advantageously 
with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He shall 
have not less the flow, the expansion, and the re- 
sistance of these. 

" 'Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal cour- 
age. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in 
your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, 
or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing 



28 EMERSON 

you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If 
you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at 
least, for your good. 

"For, if Fate is so prevailing, man also is part 
of it, and can confront Fate with Fate." 



CHAPTER III 



THE OPENER OF DOORS 



"Be an opener of doors for such as come after 
thee and do not try to make the Universe a blind 
alley" — Emerson's Journal (1841). 

THERE are certain minds which have exer- 
cised a vast influence over the thought of 
the world, as constructors of intellectual systems. 
Their ambition has been to reduce all things to 
a formula. They become masters of existing 
knowledge and arrange it in orderly fashion. Thus 
Thomas Aquinas summed up the thought of the 
middle ages in a solid theology to be received by 
all who came after him. John Calvin, with law- 
yer-like logic, did the same thing for sixteenth- 
century Protestantism. Herbert Spencer, with 
prodigious industry, gathered an immense num- 
ber of facts and attempted to bring them all into 
an agreement with his own scientific formula. 
Up to a certain point the system-maker is a 

29 



30 EMERSON 

helper to all those who would live a reasonable 
intellectual life. He shows us where to put our 
facts and to a certain degree how to use them. 
The difficulty comes when new facts are discov- 
ered which do not fit into the system, or when in 
the course of our intellectual development we 
come upon a fresh point of view. 

Then the system becomes a blind alley. We 
are led into it by a perfectly logical process, but 
there is no logical way out of it. The mind goes 
round and round and is conscious of the futility 
of its own effort. The universe is narrowed to 
the dimensions of a rigid creed. The system now 
shuts out more of reality than it explains. 

It is when we become conscious of the dangers 
of making the universe a blind alley and becom- 
ing entrapped in rigid forms that we appreciate 
the function of philosophers like William James 
and Bergson. They are emancipators of the in- 
tellect. In their keen criticism of dogmatic sys- 
tems they show us a way out. Reality, they as- 
sure us, is something vaster than any definition 
of it. 



THE OPENER OF DOORS 31 

Emerson belonged to this little company of 
emancipators, and he went about his business in 
a very simple and yet effective way. He attacked 
the assumption that what is usually called con- 
sistency is a virtue. No saying of his is more 
often quoted, and more generally misunderstood : 

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of lit- 
tle minds, adored by little statesmen and philoso- 
phers and divines. With consistency a great 
soul has nothing to do. He may as well concern 
himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak 
what you think now in hard words, and to- 
morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard 
words again, though it contradict everything you 
said to-day/' 

That may be made to seem like a plea for care- 
less and irresponsible ways of thinking and speak- 
ing. What standard are we to have by which 
to test our mental processes? I have heard the 
words quoted as if they offered an excuse for in- 
tellectual lawlessness. 



32 EMERSON 

We approach Emerson's serious meaning only 
when we emphasize the adjective. It is a foolish 
consistency which is the hobgoblin of little minds. 
The fundamental question is "consistency with 
what?" The little mind is thinking not of reality 
but of its own previous utterances. When an 
opinion is to be expressed, it says, "This must 
be made consistent with what I said yesterday. 
Let me see ! What did I say yesterday ?" Then, 
with solemn conscientiousness, yesterday's state- 
ment is repeated and there is felt the satisfaction 
which comes with duty done. 

But what if to-day's fact is really different 
from that of yesterday, and can not be expressed 
accurately by the same phrase ? This possibility 
the little mind does not entertain. It will not 
allow itself to be contradicted, and so the process 
goes on which St. Paul describes, "they measur- 
ing themselves by themselves, and comparing 
themselves among themselves, are not wise." 

Emerson's real plea is for consistency. But 
we must be consistent not with a form of words 



THE OPENER OF DOORS 33 

which we have adopted, but with a living reality 
which we encounter day by day. 

What have you seen to-day? What have you 
done? What new aspect of the universe has be- 
come clear to you ? What are the facts revealed 
in your present consciousness? These are the 
questions that are asked of a person who is using 
his mind. And his answers are valuable only as 
they are simple^ and direct. 

In a court of justice this simplicity is required. 
The witness who is trying to make his answers 
consistent with one another and with a precon- 
ceived theory is sure to come to grief. The cross- 
questioner will discover flaws in the evidence. 
The only safe course is to tell the facts as they oc- 
curred. 

Most of our intellectual confusion comes from 
the attempts to arrange our opinions according 
to an artificial order. The catechism is arranged 
in advance of experience. The questions follow 
one another in logical order, and each ques- 
tion has its appropriate answer. It is all very 



34 EMERSON 

satisfactory until the answers are sharply chal- 
lenged. How do we happen to know so much? 
How are we able to answer so glibly? 

To Emerson the chief value of a catechism lay 
in the questions, not in the answers. That the 
deepest and most persistent questions have no sat- 
isfactory answers did not depress him. It only 
proved that both the mind that asks and the uni- 
verse which delays the answer are greater than we 
thought. Their meaning can not be expressed in 
any form of words. He hears the Sphinx saying 
to the Soul : 

"Thou art the unanswered question ; 

Couldst see thy proper eye, 
Alway it asketh, asketh ; 

And each answer is a lie. 
So take thy quest through nature, 

It through thousand natures ply; 
Ask on, thou clothed eternity ; 

Time is the false reply." 

The joy of the follower of Truth and Beauty 
is wonderfully expressed in the little poem called 
"Forerunners." We are out-of-doors, and the 



THE OPENER OF DOORS 35 

air is bracing, and the distant hills are alluring. 
What does it matter that we do not catch up with 
our "happy guides"? It is enough that we are 
free to w. Let others sing of the satisfac- 

tions of achievement. Emerson is satisfied with 
a life that is a continual quest. 

"Long I fol happy guides, 

Ice les; 

The ere the day 

Breaks u - a i away. 

Keen i s as young, 

Right goc s strung, 

E;:^: t ' . ils 

To ig trails. 

On and : 'let 

Make I and sweet; 

Flowers they strew— I catch the scent; 
Or tone it 

Leave ious trace; 

Yet I cc see their face. 

On ea : * smokes, 

Mixed w iistant lochs. 

I met many 

Who the . . :ad surely kept ; 
They saw fine revellers, — 

These had crossed them while they slept. 
Some had heard their fair report, 
In the country or the court. 



36 EMERSON 

Fleetest couriers alive 

Never yet could once arrive, 

As they went or they returned, 

At the house where these sojourned. 

Sometimes their strong speed they slacken, 

Though they are not overtaken; 

In sleep their jubilant troop is near, — s 

I tuneful voices overhear; 

It may be in wood or waste, — 

At unawares 'tis come and past 

Their near camp my spirit knows 

By signs gracious as rainbows. 

I thenceforward, and long after, 

Listen for their harp-like laughter, 

And carry in my heart, for days, 

Peace that hallows rudest ways." 

It is not merely the poetic imagination which 
opens the doors into an enchanted country where 
one may wander endlessly. The sober reason has 
also an emancipatory power. There are realities 
which lie beyond the limits which the dogmatist 
defines. They may not be logically justified but 
they are nevertheless a part of the order of the 
universe. When we cease to dogmatize we be- 
come conscious of an order more wonderful than 
that which we had imagined possible. Things 
exist side by side which we had supposed to be 



THE OPENER OF DOORS 37 

absolutely incompatible. We can not logically 
reconcile them, but there they are. 

"The world refuses to be analyzed by addition 
and subtraction. When we are young, we spend 
much time and pains in filling our note-books 
with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, 
Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of 
a few years, we shall have condensed into our 
encyclopedia the net value of all the theories at 
which the world has yet arrived. But year after 
year our tables get no completeness, and at last 
we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose 
arcs will never meet. 

"Neither by detachment, neither by aggrega- 
tion, is the integrity of the intellect transmitted 
to its works, but by a vigilance which brings the 
intellect in its greatness and best state to operate 
every moment. It must have the same wholeness 
which nature has. Although no diligence can re- 
build the universe in a model, by the best accumu- 
lation or disposition of details, yet does the world 
reappear in miniature in every event, so that all 



38 EMERSON 

the laws of nature may be read in the smallest 
fact. The intellect must have the like perfection 
in its apprehension and in its works." 

Along with Emerson's insistence on an absolute 
freedom in thinking we must remember his em- 
phasis on the principle of identity which he dis- 
covers everywhere. The universe, he continually 
tells us is not a blind alley, neither is it a mere 
w r elter of conflicting forces. It is marvelously 
complicated, but touch it at any point and you will 
find it consistent with itself. Could we under- 
stand one part of it we would have the key to all 
mysteries. 

"The universe is represented in every one of 

its particles. Everything in nature contains all 
the powers of nature. Everything is made of one 
hidden stuff ; as the naturalist sees one type under 
every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a 
running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird 
as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each 
new form repeats not only the main character of 



THE OPENER OF DOORS 39 

the type, but part for part all the details, all the 
aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and. 
whole system of every other. Every occupation, 
trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world 
and a correlative of every other. Each one is an 
entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, 
its its enemies, its course, and its end. And 

each one must somehow accommodate the whole 
man, and all his 

"The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The 
microscope cannot find the animalcule which is 
less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, 
smell, motion, t mce, appetite, and organs of 
reproduction that take hold on eternity — all find 
room to consist in the small creature. So do we 
put our life into every act. The true doctrine of 
omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his 
parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of 
the universe contrives to throw itself into every 
point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the 
affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limi- 
tation." 



« 



E 



CHAPTER IV 

THE PARISH OF YOUNG MEN 

My parish is young men inquiring their way' 9 
MERSON'S parish did not include all 



young men. Indeed he was very ill at ease 
with the typical "young person." And there 
are many anecdotes which indicate that the young 
person shared the embarrassment. The gregari- 
ousness of youth with its tumultuous mass move- 
ments were rather appalling to one of his tem- 
perament. Nor was he fitted for the difficult role 
of spiritual adviser. 

Emerson's widely scattered parish was made 
up of another kind of young men. They were 
young men who were not seeking to find out his 
way, but their own. He encouraged them in it. 
That made them his debtors for life. 

These parishioners of his could not possibly be 
gathered into one congregation. They formed no 

40 



THE PARISH OF YOUNG MEN 41 

cult or party. Each was so absorbed in his own 
special endeavor that he had little time to make 
the acquaintance of his fellow 7 parishioner, but 
each in the formative period of his life had re- 
ceived the stimulus he most needed. He had been 
bewildered by the conflicting counsels of his el- 
ders. Each counsellor had said, "Be like me." 
Then one clear voice had suggested, "Why not be 
yourself?" 

The suggestion was so unexpected and yet so 
reasonable that it was acted upon. The young 
man found himself, which is the one discovery 
that counts. 

America prides itself on being the land of the 
free. We have had many political emancipators, 
but the roll of intellectual emancipators is short. 
Having dethroned kings, we live under the fear 
of public opinion. The aggregate mind tyrannizes 
over the individual intellect. There is a deadly 
average which it is not considered safe for one 
to pass. 

To his parish of young men Emerson was al- 
ways preaching that the world is in dire need of 



42 EMERSON 

men with fresh insight who are not satisfied with 
things as they are. The "average man" should 
not be content with •the average attainment. He 
has within him powers whic litly used c: 

lift him far above his pres: edition. He is, 

and of right ought to be, a free and in:' 
soul. A decent respect for the opinion of the 
world demands that he i declare his inde- 

pendence in unmistakable terms. 

"What strikes us in the fine genius is that 
which belongs of right to every one. A man 
should know himself for a necessary actor. A 
link was wanting between two craving parts of 
nature, and he was hui ing as the bridge 

over that ing nee tor betwixt two 

else mini? le facts. wo parents held 

each of cue cf the wants, c tie union of for- 
eign cc in him err him to do gladly 
and grace ed human race 
could not have s d do. He knows his ma- 
terials; he applies I his work; he can not 
read, or think, or look, but he unites the hitherto 



THE PARISH OF YOUNG MEN 43 

separated strands — into a perfect cord. The 
thoughts he delights to utter are the reason of his 
incarnation. Is it for him to account himself 
cheap and superfluous, or to linger by the wayside 
for opportunities? Did he not come into being 
because something must be done which he and 
no other is and does? If only he sees, the world 
will be visible enough. He need not study where 
to stand, nor to put things in favorable lights ; in 
him is the light, from him all things are illumi- 
nated to their centre. What patron shall he ask 
for employment and reward? Hereto was he 
born, to deliver the thought of his heart from the 
universe to the universe, to do an office which 
nature could not forego, nor he be discharged 
from rendering, and then immerge again into 
the holy silence and eternity out of which as a 
man he arose. God is rich, and many more men 
than one he harbours in his bosom, biding their 
time and the needs and the beauty of all. Is not 
this the theory of every man's genius or faculty? 
Why then goest thou as some Boswell or listening 
worshipper to this saint or to that? That is the 



44 EMERSON 

only lese-majesty. Here art thou with whom so 
long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou 
think meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate 
brought forth to unite his ragged sides, to shoot 
the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?" 

As for the chill wisdom of age with its timid 
counsels, let the young man defy it. Length of 
days does not bring wisdom unless it is accom- 
panied by a power of spiritual rejuvenation, and 
then it becomes the wisdom of perpetual youth- 
fulness. 

"Why should we import rags and relics into 
the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old 
age seems the only disease; all others run into 
this one. We call it by many names — fever, in- 
temperance, insanity, stupidity, and crime; they 
are all forms of old age; they are rest, conserv- 
atism, appropriation, inertia, not newness, not 
the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see 
no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is 
above us, we do not grow old, but grow young. 
Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious 



THE PARISH OF YOUNG MEN 45 

eye looking upward, counts itself nothing, and 
abandons itself to the instruction flowing from 
all sides. But the man and woman of seventy- 
assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, 
they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the 
necessary, and talk down to the young. Let them, 
then, become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them 
be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes 
are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are 
perfumed again with hope and power. This old 
age ought not to creep on a human mind. In 
nature every moment is new; the past is ahvays 
swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sa- 
cred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the 
energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath 
or covenant to secure it against a higher love. 
No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to- 
morrow in the light of new thoughts. People 
wish to be settled; only as far as they are unset- 
tled is there any hope for them/' 

The reader will observe that Emerson in the 
midst of his praise of the spirit of youth gives a 



46 EMERSON 

sly dig at one of the foibles of his parishioners. 
There is a quality of bumptiousness which is 
often found in early life. Emerson treats it as 
a kind of premature senility. "Whilst we con- 
verse with what is above us we do not grow old." 
Conversely the person who cannot look up religi- 
ously to something above his present attainments 
had aged rapidly. A person maybe a dotard while 
yet in the twenties. This was a sobering thought 
not unfrequently presented to the parish of young 
men. 



CHAPTER V 

SPENT THE DAY AT ESSEX JUNCTION 

"August 16, 1868. Came home last night from 
Vermont with Ellen. Stopped at Middlebury on the 
nth, Tuesday, and read my discourse on Greatness, 
and the good work and influence of heroic scholars. 
On Wednesday spent the day at Essex Junction, 
and traversed the banks and much of the bed of the 
Winooski river, much admiring the falls, and the 
noble mountain peaks of Mansfield and Camel's 
Hump (which there appears to be the highest), and 
the view of the Adirondacks across the lake!' 

ONE intent on becoming intimate with Em- 
erson might well postpone reading the 
Oversoul, till he had meditated on the text, 
"Spent the Day at Essex Junction." Perhaps no 
junction point in all New England has been the 
innocent cause of more vituperation than Essex 
Junction. Here, for more than a generation, im- 
patient people have alighted and waited for trains 
which were not arranged for their convenience. 
To the commercial traveler, Essex Junction rep- 

47 



48 EMERSON 

resents a sheer waste of time. To the summer 
tourist it means a postponement of enjoyment, 
[t is a place on the way to somewhere else. 

But to Emerson, Essex Junction was not con- 
ceived of as a point of departure until the hour 
came when he must actually depart. This was 
not till evening. In the meantime, he was living 
in Essex Junction rather than merely passing 
through it. There was no hurry, so that he had 
ample time to enjoy the banks of the Winooski 
river and the view of the distant mountains. 

Emerson was on the way to Mount Mansfield, 
at which he arrived in due time. The next morn- 
ing at the Mountain Hotel "a man went through 
the house ringing a loud bell and shouting 'Sun- 
rise/ and everybody dressed in haste and went 
down to the piazza." Emerson joined the eager 
procession and had his look with the rest of them. 
" After many sharp looks at the heavens and 
earth, we descended to breakfast. I found in this 
company many agreeable people." 

In this recital you have a glimpse of his phi- 
losophy of life. Essex Junction, Mount Mans- 



V 



DAY AT ESSEX JUNCTION 49 

field and the troop of fellow-boarders who 
snatched a hasty sunrise on the way to break- 
fast were not all alike. In fact, they were quite 
different. But they were all equally real. The 
contemplation of them absorbed successive mo- 
ments of 'his conscious life. Each for a little 
while occupied the foreground of his mind and 
became the representative of the cosmos. Each 
in its place and in its time was interesting. When 
it came to the question which was the most in- 
teresting, he would let them fight it out among 
themselves. 

This was the philosophy of the Mountain and 
the Squirrel. 

"I am not so large as you, 
You are not so small as I 
And not half so spry." 

That talents differ is the fact on which we must 
agree before there can be any toleration or ap- 
preciation. Most of us have a bad habit of taking 
a personal preference and elevating it into a uni- 
versal standard of value. Each new object is 



50 EMERSON 

weighed in the balance and found wanting. We 
say, this is not that, and therefore it is not worth 
our attention. The word "discrimination" takes 
on a hostile meaning. We are likely to say "dis- 
criminate against." The word "criticize" has 
also a suggestion of unfriendliness, for it is con- 
cerned with the perception of differences. 

Emerson's habitual point of view was that of 
appreciative discrimination. This is not that, of 
course not; it is quite different — that is what 
makes it interesting. Even where the tubs look 
alike, it is pleasant to consider that each stands on 
its own bottom. 

What is the most important place in all the 
world? For you it is the place where you actu- 
ally are at this moment. This is the only point 
from which at this particular time the universe 
is visible to you. If you are truly alive, you do 
not need a man with a bell to summon you to the 
sunrise. The day has its clear call. 

"The inevitable morning 

Finds them who in cellars be 



DAY AT ESSEX JUNCTION 51 

And be sure that all-loving Nature 

Will smile in a factory. 
L Yon ridge of purple landscape, 

Yon sky beneath the walls, 
Hold all the hidden wonders 

In their scanty intervals." 

There is a curious restlessness which is often 
mistaken for idealism. Not finding satisfaction 
in our real environment, we are filled with the 
desire to be somewhere else. When this restless- 
ness becomes chronic, there is "that driven feel- 
ing" which transforms the pursuit of happiness 
into a hurried flight from unhappiness. Even 
our holidays become nerve-destroying tasks, as 
with jaded minds we are carried about to the 
places where we wait for sensations that do not 
come. And with our eyes on our watches, we 
know that we must hurry if we are not to miss 
the next sight that we have paid for. 

Palestine was not a tourist country in the days 
when the author of Ecclesiastes wrote of the va- 
rious vanities he had seen under the sun ; else he 
might have added a lamentation over the futility 
of an empty mind going about in search of cul- 



52 EMERSON 

ture. This is a vanity I have seen. I have seen 
a rich, foolish man who came to a city strange 
and old, and that had a great history. Yet did 
he not seek to know what that history was, nor 
did he save an hour for quiet meditation on what 
he saw. He spent much gold to come to the 
place where the city was, and when he was there 
he worried over the delay in getting away. And 
that foolish rich man remembered nothing of the 
city except a dinner which was not so good as he 
might have had at home. 

Because he found so much to interest him at 
home Emerson takes a whimsical pleasure in 
speaking against foreign travel as a means of cul- 
ture. But he evidently had in mind the exces- 
sive value that was in his day put upon Europe 
and its traditions. 

His disparagement of travel did not arise from 
any incuriosity. He had an eager desire to see all 
the world. But he was like a small boy who, hav- 
ing learned that the procession is to pass by his 
own house, takes his position on his own door 



DAY AT ESSEX JUNCTION 53 

step. Why should he go away when by staying 
at home he is sure to see the show ? 

"It is for want of self -culture that the super- 
stition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, Eng- 
land, Egypt, retains its fascination for all edu- 
cated Americans. They who made England, Italy, 
or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by 
sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the 
earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our 
place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man 
stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, 
on any occasion, call him from his house, or into 
foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make 
men sensible by the expression of his counte- 
nance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and 
virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, 
and not like an interloper or a valet. 

"I have no churlish objection to the circum- 
navigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, 
of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first 
domesticated, or does not go abroad with the 



54 EMERSON 

hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. 
He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat 
which he does not carry, travels away from him- 
self, and grows old even in youth among old 
things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind 
have become old and dilapidated as they. He 
carries ruins to ruins. 

"Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first jour- 
neys discover to us the indifference of places. At 
home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be 
intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I 
pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on 
the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there 
beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelent- 
ing, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vati- 
can, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated 
with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxi- 
cated. My giant goes with me wherever I go." 

There are times when the medium at a seance ex- 
cuses herself for her inability to put the sitter in 
communication with departed spirits. She does 



DAY AT ESSEX JUNCTION 55 

not know what is the matter, but "the conditions 
are not right." 

Every traveler has experienced a similar dif- 
ficulty. He has spent time and money to go to a 
famous spot; his body has been transported 
but not his soul. There are inhibitions that pre- 
vent imaginative communion with the mighty 
past. 

Emerson preferred to be in Essex Junction 
when the spiritual conditions were right rather 
than in Rome when his mind was not properly 
functioning. Essex Junction is a wonderful place 
if one happens to be in the mood for seeing it. 



CHAPTER VI 

FRIENDSHIP WITHOUT INTIMACY 

"There is a strange face in the Freshman class 
whom I should like to know very much. He has a 
great deal of character in his features and should 
be a fast friend or a bitter enemy. His name is 
. / shall endeavor to become better ac- 
quainted with him and wish, if possible, to recall at 
a future period the singular sensations which his 
presence produced in me." — Journal, 1820. 

EMERSON was an upper classman, albeit 
only seventeen years of age, when he wrote 
thus of Martin Gay of Hingham, afterward a 
distinguished analytical chemist living in Boston. 
Emerson's son, commenting on this passage, says 
that there is no evidence that his father, either in 
college or afterward, ever made any advances to- 
ward further acquaintance. It does not appear 
that he ever really knew him, yet he was always 
interested to hear of him, and was grieved at his 
untimely death in 1850. The two men were en- 

56 



FRIENDSHIP WITHOUT INTIMACY 57, 

tirely different in their temperaments and inter- 
ests, Gay being known by his classmates as "cool 
Gay." 

This capacity for shy admirations for his oppo- 
sites, and for friendly interests in people with 
whom he would find it difficult to keep up a con- 
versation, was characteristic of Emerson. He 
was sometimes painfully conscious of it as a bar- 
rier which prevented him from really "getting at" 
people whom he wished to know. At other times 
he defended the attitude that was natural to him, 
and so made a virtue of his necessity. 

To most persons, Emerson's essay on Friend- 
ship is unsatisfactory as an exposition of the sub- 
ject, though it is very revealing of the author's 
state of mind. "Friendship/' says Emerson, "like 
the immortality of the soul, is too good to be be- 
lieved." And his account of friendship has a fine 
aloofness that befits the love for a disembodied 
spirit rather than a warm attachment to an im- 
perfect creature of flesh and blood. 

One of the conditions that Emerson would 
make in a treaty of friendship would be that 



58 EMERSON 

neither party should trespass on the personality 
of others. It was friendship by "absent treat- 



ment 

"Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful 
souls by intruding on them ? Why insist on rash 
personal relations with your friend? Why go to 
his house, and know his mother and brother and 
sisters? Why be visited by him at your own? 
Are these things material to our covenant ? Leave 
this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a 
spirit. 

"To my friend I write a letter, and from him 
I receive a letter. That seems to you little. It 
suffices me. 

"You shall not come nearer to a man by getting 
into his house. We see the noble afar off, why 
should we intrude?" 

In all this we feel that Emerson was riding his 
high horse. It is a shy man's way of comforting 
himself for something that he unfortunately lacks, 
but which he would give anything to possess. He 



FRIENDSHIP WITHOUT INTIMACY 59 

was, to use Paul's phrase, glorying in his infirmi- 
ties. That which he was praising was not friend- 
ship but sublimated hero-worship, which is quite 
a different thing. 

In the privacy of his note-books he treats his 
infirmity in quite a different spirit. He laments 
the fact that he was not a good mixer. Like so 
many New Englanders, it was difficult for him to 
establish personal relations. 

At the age of twenty, when looking forward 
to the ministry, he makes this self-criticism : 

"Every comparison of myself with my mates 
that six or seven, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, 
years have made has convinced me that there 
exists a signal defect of character which neutral- 
izes in great part the just influence my talents 
ought to have." He expresses it as the "absence 
of common sympathies." By this he seems to 
mean the absence of the material for "small talk." 
"Its bitter fruits are a sore uneasiness in the com- 
pany of most men and women, a frigid fear of 
offending and jealousy of disrespect, an inability 
to lead and an unwillingness to follow the cur- 



60 EMERSON 

rent conversation. ... In my frequent humili- 
ation I am compelled to remember the poor boy 
who cried, 'I told you, father, they would find 
me out. 5 " He sums up his youthful confession, 
"What is called a warm heart, I have it not." 

When he was sixty, he was conscious of the 
same limitation. He jotted down in his note- 
book: "Barriers of man impassable. They who 
should be friends cannot pass into each other. 
Friends are fictitious, founded on some momen- 
tary experience. But what we want is consecu- 
tiveness." 

All this is not evidence of lack of a warm heart. 
It was rather a lack of an easy way of expressing 
what he felt. The chill was not in himself, but 
in the atmosphere that was about him. But there 
was evidently a personal experience behind this 
generalization about society. 

"Society, like wealth, is good for those who un- 
derstand it. It is a foolish waste of time for 
those who do not. It seems impossible for any 
one to expand in a crowd to his natural dimen- 



FRIENDSHIP WITHOUT INTIMACY 61 

sions. All character seems to fade away from all 
the accomplices. Every woman seems suffering 
for a chair, and you accuse yourself and com- 
miserate those you talk to." 

There is something delightfully amusing in 
Emerson's analysis of his own failure as a con- 
versationalist. 

"It seemed, as I mused in the streets of Bos- 
ton on the unpropitious effect of the town on my 
humor, that there needs a certain deliberation and 
tenacity in the entertainment of a thought — a cer- 
tain longanimity to make that confidence and sta- 
bility which can meet the demands others make 
on us. I am too quick-eyed and unstable. My 
thoughts are too short, as they say my sentences 
are. I step along from stone to stone over the 
Lethe which gurgles around my path, but the 
odds are that my companion encounters me just 
as I leave one stone, and before my foot has well 
reached the other, and down I tumble into Lethe 
water. But the man of long wind who receives 



62 EMERSON 

his thought with a certain phlegmatic entertain- 
ment, and unites himself to it for the time, as a 
sailor to a boat, has a better principle of poise 
and is not easily moved from the perpendicular/' 

With the remarkable group of men who made 
Concord famous, Emerson was on terms of fa- 
miliar friendship. For Bronson Alcott he cher- 
ished an admiration which seems extravagant. 
He loved to walk and talk with the shy poet, 
Ellery Channing. Thoreau was for two years an 
inmate of Emerson's house, and the two men 
worked in the garden together. In Boston Emer- 
son was a member of the Saturday Club, where 
he continually met Longfellow, Holmes, Agassiz 
and the rest. 

Yet he was not a man to shine in such society. 
His mind was contemplative, rather than conver- 
sational. He did not care to "hold his own" in 
a controversy. Why should he ? "Emerson was 
a good citizen and a good neighbor with his neigh- 
bors, always went to town meeting and listened 
intently to the strong spirits who ruled the dis- 



FRIENDSHIP WITHOUT INTIMACY 63 

cussions, without taking any part in them him- 
self." 

The most notable of his friendships was with 
Thomas Carlyle. The correspondence between 
them continued for many years, and there were 
many expressions of esteem. The friendship was 
a real one, but the fact that the broad Atlantic 
lay between them was a great aid to their good 
fellowship. For though the two men liked each 
other, they did not like the same things. 

Carlyle threatened to visit America, and we 
may be sure that he would not have enjoyed the 
visit. Emerson's cheery faith in the common 
man seemed to the testy Scotchman a bit of senti- 
mentalism. They both believed in hero-worship, 
but they did not worship the same heroes. New 
England Transcendentalism did not agree with 
Carlyle's temper. 

Emerson sent a copy of the Dial to his friend. 
Carlyle writes, "The Dial No. 1 came duly. Of 
course I read it with interest; it is the utterance 
of what is youngest in your land, pure, etherial 
as the voices of the morning! And yet — you 



64 EMERSON 

know me — for me it is too ether ial, speculative, 
theoretic ; all theory becomes more and more con- 
fessedly inadequate, untrue, unsatisfactory, al- 
most a kind of mocking to me." 

"Faithful are the wounds of a friend." And 
these tokens of friendship were seldom absent 
from the letters that passed between the two. 
Carlyle writes of the impression Emerson's es- 
says made upon him : 

"It is a sermon to me as all your deliberate ut- 
terances are ; a real word which I feel to be such 
— alas, almost or altogether the one such, in a 
world all full of jargons, hearsays, echoes and 
vain noises which cannot pass with me for words. 
This is a praise far beyond any 'literary' one; 
literary praises are not worth repeating in com- 
parison. For the rest I have to object still (what 
you will call objecting to the Law of Nature) that 
we find you a speaker indeed, but as it were a 
soliloquizer on the eternal mountain tops 6nly, in 
vast solitudes where men and their affairs lie all 
hushed in a dim remoteness; and only the man 



FRIENDSHIP WITHOUT INTIMACY 65 

and the stars are visible, whom so fine a fellow 
seems he, we could perpetually punch into and say, 
'Why won't you come and help us then? We 
have terrible need of one man like you down 
among us ! It is cold and vacant up there ; noth- 
ing paintable but rainbows and emotions; come 
down and you shall do life pictures, passions, 
facts — which transcend all thought, and leave it 
stuttering and stammering!' To which he an- 
swers that he won't, can't and doesn't want to (as 
the cockneys have it) : so I leave him and say, 
'You Western Gymnosophist ! Well, we can af- 
ford one man for that, too/ " 

This is all very well for a friendship carried on 
by correspondence. Carlyle thinks of himself as 
a man who is dealing with concrete realities, while 
Emerson is dealing in remote abstractions. 

But had they lived in the same town with 
opportunity to discuss the practical questions of 
politics and social welfare, they would have come 
into collision. The fact was that Emerson was as 
much interested in concrete realities as Carlyle, 



66 EMERSON 

but he came to different conclusions in regard to 
them. Carlyle believed in government by strong 
men, like Frederick the Great and Cromwell. 
Democracy was an abomination to him. A states- 
man like Lincoln, who thought of himself as an 
interpreter of the popular will, was altogether 
outside his sympathy. Liberalism of the modern 
sort seemed to him utter weakness and muddle- 
headedness. 

Emerson, though he preferred to write about 
principles rather than their immediate applica- 
tions, was never in doubt as to which side he was 
on. The principles which he preached w r ere the 
ones which were being applied by the democratic 
reformers of his own day. He believed in the 
movements at which Carlyle scoffed. Answering 
his friend's criticism, he says : 

"What you say now and heretofore respecting 
the remoteness of my writing and thinking from 
real life, though I hear substantially the same 
criticism made by my countrymen, I do not know 
what it means." 



FRIENDSHIP WITHOUT INTIMACY 67 

Indeed, Emerson's idea of real life differed so 
profoundly from Carlyle's that their minds sel- 
dom met. To him the laws of the universe were 
not only the great realities, but the most intimate 
realities. Every person and every action illus- 
trated them. He believed in the principles of 
democracy which Carlyle scorned. These funda- 
mental differences would have been accentuated 
in daily intercourse. The visit of the Scotchman 
to New England never took place, and it was well 
that it did not; "for," says Emerson, "the higher 
the style we demand of friendship the less easy to 
establish it in flesh and blood." 



CHAPTER VII 

I HATE THIS SHALLOW AMERICANISM 

"I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to 
get rich by credits, to get knowledge by raps on mid- 
night tables, to learn the economy of mind by phre- 
nology, or skill without study, or mastery without 
apprenticeship, or sale of goods through pretending 
they will sell, or power through making believe you 
are powerful. They think they have got it, but they 
have got something else." 

A CONTEMPORARY of Emerson was Judge 
2. A. Haliburton of Nova Scotia, the creator of 
Sam Slick. Mr. Slick of Slickville, Connecticut, 
was a typical Yankee as seen by neighbors across 
the northern border. He was shrewd, enterpris- 
ing, inquisitive, good-humored, and in his way re- 
ligious. He was an ardent patriot, with his eye on 
the main chance. He was good at a bargain, and 
still better at an argument in defense of his recti- 
tude in the transaction. He was no hypocrite, for 
he saw no reason to pretend to be something 

68 



SHALLOW AMERICANISM 69 

which he was not. He was simply a plain Amer- 
ican citizen and he didn't care who knew it. There 
were thousands in Connecticut just as good as he 
was. He felt it a privilege to represent the Great 
Republic. 

The blatant Americanism of Sam Slick must 
be compared with the solid English complacency 
of Mr. Podsnap. Both were caricatures of na- 
tional failings which w T ere easily recognizable. 
Emerson was enough of an American to under- 
stand Sam Slick and to laugh with him as well 
as to laugh at him, but he recognized that this 
shallow Americanism had its dangers. 

The very ease with which the American could 
make a living made him overestimate his own 
powers. He took the gifts of nature in a new 
continent for rewards for his own merit. Bold 
as he was and self-assertive in little things, he 
lacked in any standard by which to judge him- 
self. He was gregarious in his mental habits, 
and curiously averse to strenuous intellectual 
effort. 

"The timidity of our public opinion is our dis- 



70 EMERSON 

ease, or shall I say the publicness of our opinion, 
the absence of private opinion. Good nature is 
plentiful but we want justice with heart of steel to 
fight down the proud." America has not pro- 
duced a sufficient number of men who will in- 
stinctively throw themselves "on the side of weak- 
ness, of youth, of hope; on the liberal, on the 
expansive side, never on the defensive, the con- 
serving, the timorous, the lock-and-bolt system." 

"I find no expression in our State papers or 
legislative debate in our lyceums or churches, 
especially in our newspapers, of a high national 
feeling, no lofty counsels that rightfully stir the 
blood. I speak of those organs which can be pre- 
sumed to speak a popular sense. They recom- 
mend conventional virtues, whatever will earn 
and preserve property; always the capitalist, the 
college, the church, the hospital, the theater, the 
hotel, the road, the ship, the capitalist, whatever 
goes to secure, adorn, enlarge these is good ; what- 
ever jeopardizes any of these is damnable." 



SHALLOW AMERICANISM 71 

This description of a familiar kind of Ameri- 
canism in 1844 is easily recognizable in 1920. 
The shallow reformers are equally familiar. 

"Many a reformer perishes in the removal of 
rubbish, and that makes the offensiveness of this 
class. They are partial, they are not equal to the 
work they pretend. They lose their way in the 
assault on the kingdom of darkness; they expend 
all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose 
their sanity and power of benefit. It is of little 
moment that one or two or twenty errors in our 
social system be corrected, but of much that the 
man be in his senses." 

No foreign critic has ever pointed out more 
clearly the faults of the American temperament. 
But shallow Americanism, with its boast fulness 
and its conventionality, can not blind him to the 
ideal America that lies far deeper. It is yet in the 
making. 

"We cannot look on the freedom of this coun- 



72 EMERSON 

try, in connection with its youth, without a pre- 
sentiment that here shall laws and institutions 
exist on some scale of proportion to the majesty 
of nature. To men legislating for the area be- 
twixt the two oceans, betwixt the snows and the 
tropics, somewhat of the grandeur of nature will 
infuse itself into the code. A heterogeneous 
population crowding on all ships from all corners 
of the world to the great gates of North America, 
namely, Boston, New York, and New Orleans, 
and thence proceeding inward to the prairie and 
the mountains, and quickly contributing their 
private thought to the public opinion, their toll 
to the treasury, and their vote to the election, it 
cannot be doubted that the legislation of this 
country should become more catholic and cos- 
mopolitan than that of any other. It seems so 
easy for America to inspire and express the most 
expansive and humane spirit; new-born, free, 
healthful, strong, the land of the labourer, of the 
democrat, of the philanthropist, of the believer, 
of the saint, she should speak for the human race. 
It is the country of the future. Like Washington, 



SHALLOW AMERICANISM 73 

proverbially 'the city of magnificent distances/ 
through all its cities, States, and Territories, it is 
a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, 
and expectations. 

"Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly 
Destiny by which the human race is guided — the 
race never dying, the individual never spared — 
to results affecting masses and ages. Men are 
narrow and selfish, but the Genius or Destiny is 
not narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered 
in their calculated and voluntary activity, but in 
what befalls, with or without their design/' 

Emerson believed as much as the politicians of 
his day in Manifest Destiny. But he hoped for 
the country a destiny greater than that which the 
politicians planned. The commercial progress of 
the day was something to rejoice in as a part of 
a great onward movement. But commercialism 
was not the end toward which the nation was 
moving. - 

"Our part is plainly not to throw ourselves 
across the track, to block improvement, and sit 



74 EMERSON 

till we are stone, but to watch the uprise of suc- 
cessive mornings, and to conspire with the work 
of new days. Government has been a fossil; it 
should be a plant. I conceive that the office of 
statute law should be to express, and not to im- 
pede the mind of mankind. New thoughts, new 
things. Trade was one instrument, but Trade 
is also for a time, and must give way to some- 
thing broader and better, whose signs are already 
dawning in the sky." 



CHAPTER VIII 



THE POET 



"I am born a poet — of a low class without doubt, 
but a poet. ThatJs my nature and vocation. My 
singing, to be sure, is very husky and is for the most 
part in prose. Still I am a poet in the sense of a per- 
ceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are in 
the soul and in matter, and specially of the corre- 
spondence between them" 

EMERSON'S estimate of his poetical gifts 
was given in a letter to his future wife. 
When he soMearly points out his limitations, it 
seems ungracious to agree with his critical judg- 
ment, but one must do so. He was not a poet 
in the sense of a maker of mighty harmonies. He 
did not walk like Milton, with his "singing robes" 
about him. But he was a poet in the sense of 
being a perceiver .and dear lover of natural har- 
monies, and he made us sharers of his perception. 
His singing voice was certainly very husky. 
Only a few of his poems stand the test of being 

75 



76 EMERSON 

read aloud with perfect pleasure. Frequently we 
are conscious of a metrical jolt. Not only is the 
ear pained by dissonance, but there is a sense that 
the poetical inspiration has suddenly given out. 

I am inclined to think that Emerson would 
have been happier if he had frankly adopted "free 
verse." For though he was a poet, he was not a 
natural rhymster. In "Merlin" he makes a decla- 
ration of independence which would please our 
new poets. 

"Great is the art 
Great be the manners, of the bard. 
He shall not his brain encumber 
With the coil of rhythm and number." 

And then he weakens his declaration by add- 
ing: 

"But, leaving rule and pale forethought, 
He shall aye climb 
For his rhyme." 

The critic is tempted to ask, Why not let the 
rhyme go rather than climb for it? Emerson's 
rhymes were often most unhappy, and had the 
air of being forced into service. 



THE POET 77 

Read his "May Day/' You will find jingling 
rhymes like 

"Not for a regiment's parade, 
Nor evil laws or rulers made, 
Blue Walden rolls its cannonade." 

We have such lines as these : 

"Every tree and stem and chink 
Gushed with syrup to the brink. 
The air stole into the streets of towns, 
Refreshed the wise, reformed the clowns. ,, 

After these rhymes that are easy to a fault, we 
have others that are difficult: as almanac and 
coming-back, Superior Lake and Mackinac, cava- 
Hers and travelers. Sometimes an obsolete word 
is introduced for the sake of an imperfect rhyme : 

"They shook the snow from hats and shoon, 
They put their April raiment on." 

All this needs to be said at the beginning. It 
is when full allowance is made for his poetical 
lapses that we are prepared to appreciate Emer- 
son's real poetical gifts. While he had no power 



78 EMERSON 

of sustained verbal melody, he has given an un- 
usual number of perfect lines. 

In "Voluntaries" we have a succession of com- 
monplace verses, and then come upon the lines 
that seemed chiseled by some great artist, aus- 
terely beautiful and true: 

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low, Thou must, 
The Youth replies, I can." 

In "Forerunners" one would not change a 
word. There is a gladness of adventure. 

"Each and All," "The Problem," "Days," are 
sources of endless delight. In "Two Rivers," 
Emerson expresses melodiously his poetical creed. 
He is a perceiver and dear lover of the corre- 
spondence between the outer and the inner worlds. 
The little river that runs through Concord is the 
symbol of the eternities. 

"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, 

Repeats the music of the rain, 

But sweeter rivers pulsing flit 

Through thee, as thou through Concord plain. 



THE POET 79 

"Thou in thy narrow bed art pent, 
The stream I love unbounded goes 
Through flood and sea and firmament, 
Through light, through life, it forward flows." 

In the longer poems, like "Monadnock" and 
"Woodnotes," there is nothing consecutive. One 
might read them as Emerson himself was ac- 
customed to read, beginning at the last page and 
turning back the leaves in search of a rewarding 
sentence. But there is a sparkling atmosphere 
and a sense of the New England woods and hills. 



(( } 



Twas one of the charmed days 
When the genius of God doth flow, 
The wind may alter twenty ways, 
A tempest cannot blow/ 5 

Emerson is the poet of nature, and it is nature 
as revealed in New England. We see the "twi- 
light parks of beech and pine," and the purple 
berries, the upland pastures, the delicate mosses, 
the granite ledges, over which the brooks go tum- 
bling, the mountain lakes "edged with sand and 
grass," the "damp fields known to bird and fox." 



80 EMERSON 

Nowhere is it far to the primitive granite, yet the 
land is not bare. Even on the ledges "the rope- 
like pine roots crosswise grown" give a home- 
like invitation. Nature is everywhere friendly, 
though there is a trace of austerity about her 
welcome. 

But to the poet the outward forms of nature 
are but symbols. 

"Give me truths, 
For I am weary of surfaces, 
And die of inanition." 

Flashing through woods and mountains and 
sky, he sees truths that strengthen and inspire. 
What he seeks to express in his poetry is 

". . . the sweet affluence of love and song, 
The rich results of the divine consents 
Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover." 

Every poet who has any distinctive quality and 
is not merely an imitator of other poets sees 
something which he wants to express. This in- 
sight is his real contribution. The skill with 



THE POET 81 

which he is able to communicate what he sees is 
another matter. 

The poets of the most universal appeal are 
those who see what everybody else sees, only 
more intensely, and who can tell their story in 
words which every one understands. Robert 
Burns, Whittier, James Whitcomb Riley, need no 
interpreters. They themselves are interpreting 
what we have already experienced. 

There are other poets whose endeavor is to 
make us see something which, without their help, 
we might miss, or at least treat as something un- 
poetical. Browning saw a greater complexity in 
human conduct and character than we usually rec- 
ognize, and he sought to present this complexity 
to the imagination as well as to the reason. This 
involved a good deal of explanation on his part, 
and explanatory remarks are always prose. But 
the true Browning lover knows what his poet is 
driving at and helps him out when he gets into 
difficulties. 

Walt Whitman saw the poetry which is in mere 
bulk and the sublimity that is in great bare spaces. 



82 EMERSON 

Let others sing of the finished products of art and 
nature; he would celebrate the glory of the im- 
perfect, the romance of the raw material. To his 
mind a catalogue of the most ordinary things was 
suggestive. It was the stuff poems are made of. 
It was an inventory of the wealth we hold in com- 
mon. He repeats the names of American states 
and cities as Milton repeated the names of the 
places old in story, which in his imagination stood 
for all sorts of vague sublimities. If we catch 
something of this imaginative enthusiasm for 
crude bulk and wide spaces and overflowing vi- 
tality, then we greet Whitman as a great poet. 
Otherwise, we make nothing of him. "There are 
in the world/' says Paul, "many kinds of voices, 
and no voice is without its significance." But he 
adds, if we do not understand the person who 
is talking, he is a barbarian to us and we are as 
barbarians to him. 

The poetry of Emerson has a quality growing 
out of a peculiar way of looking at things. Whit- 
man saw things in the rough. "Here is what 
moves in magnificent masses, careless of particu- 



THE POET 83 

lars." Emerson saw the motion of masses, but 
he was not careless of particulars. His attention 
was fixed not upon the mass but on the particles 
of which it was composed. And his quick eye 
perceived that these particles had each a motion 
of its own, and that the motion was bewilderingly 
rapid. 

Our dull eyes see results but not processes. We 
talk of the quickness of thought, but we are really 
very slow-witted creatures and seldom see what 
is going on. The things which we watch and talk 
about are really the things which have already 
happened, just as we may be looking at a star by 
light, which only tells us that it was shining some 
centuries ago. Our judgment on what we call 
current events is apt to be misleading because it 
is not strictly contemporaneous. 

The great illusion is that of arrested motion. 
Things seem to us to stand still, which in reality 
are whirling about with inconceivable velocity. 
Our sciences have demonstrated what our senses 
can not perceive, and that which staggers our 
imagination. 



84 EMERSON 

The astronomer tells us of the way this earthen 
ball on which we live goes hurtling through space. 
But even the astronomer does not feel the motion. 
The chemist tells us of the wild dances of the 
molecules. We in a dull way perceive the fact of 
growth and decay and attraction and repulsion, 
but we do not perceive them as incessantly hap- 
pening. When a powder mill is destroyed, we 
are startled by the explosion. But of the multi- 
tude of tiny explosions, which result in the open- 
ing of a rose, or the scattering of thistledown, 
we are unconscious. 

Now Emerson was profoundly stirred by 
thought of the explosive power of nature. In- 
deed his world was always exploding. He at- 
tempts to express the sense of these sudden hap- 
penings in his poetry. He is preeminently the 
poet of swift motion. 

"Hearken! Hearken? 
If thou wouldst know the mystic song 
Chanted when the sphere was young. 
Aloft, abroad, the paean swells ; 
O wise man! hear'st thou half it tells? 



THE POET 85 

O wise man ! hear'st thou the least part ? 

'Tis the chronicle of art. 

To the open air it sings 

Sweet the genesis of things, 

Of tendency through endless ages, 

Of star dust, and star-pilgrimages, 

Of rounded worlds, of space and time, 

Of the old flood's subsiding slime, 

Of chemic matter, force and form, 

Of poles and powers, cold, wet and warm: 

The rushing metamorphosis 

Dissolving all that fixture is, 

Melts things that be to things that seem, 

And solid nature to a dream. 

O, listen to the undersong, 

The ever old, the ever young ; 

And, far within the cadent pauses, 

The chorus of the ancient Causes !" 

This was the theme of Emerson's poetry. It 
was the genesis of things as revealed by modern 
science and interpreted by the poetic imagination. 
He was the poet of the "rushing metamorphosis." 

It was a world in which there was persistent 
force and ever-changing form. The world soul 
cries, 



86 EMERSON 

"Hearken once more ! 
I will tell thee the mundane lore. 
Older am I than thy numbers wot, 
Change I may, but I pass not. 
Hitherto all things fast abide, 
And anchored in the tempest ride. 
Trenchant Time behooves to hurry 
All to yean and all to bury : 
All the forms are fugitive, 
But the substances survive." 

And that calm for which philosophers have 
always yearned, how shall we attain it? Not by 
standing still, seeking refuge in some venerable 
form, but by flinging ourselves into the swift cur- 
rent, and yielding ourselves to the eternal power. 

It is possible for a man's thought to keep step 
with nature "with triumphant piercing sight," 
seeing the end toward which all things move. 

"On him the light of star and moon 

Shall fall with purer radiance down ; 

All constellations of the sky 

Shed their virtue through his eye, 

Him Nature giveth for defence 

His formidable innocence; 

The mounting sap, the shells, the sea, 

All spheres, all stones his helpers be. 



THE POET, 87 

He shall never be old 
Nor his fate shall be foretold ; 
He shall meet the speeding year 
Without wailing, without fear." 

The Actual is swift, but the Ideal is swifter. 

"Thee gliding through a sea of form, 
Like the lightning through a storm, 
Somewhat not to be possessed, 
Somewhat not to be caressed, 
No feet so fleet could ever find, 
No perfect form could ever bind, 
Thou eternal fugitive, 
Hovering over all that live, 
Quick and skilful to inspire 
Sweet, extravagant desire." 

There are poems of Emerson whicli we can 
make nothing of unless we have happened to 
brood over the same problems. There is "Initial, 
Daemonic and Celestial Love." It is unreadable, 
unless one reads between the lines. 

When we ask what it is all about? the answer is 
that it is an attempt to follow that "rushing 
metamorphosis" that we call love. Under one 
name we speak of the attraction of sex which 



88 EMERSON 

man shares with all the animal world, and the 
highest and most disinterested affections. Here 
is a passion in its beginning sensuous and selfish, 
capable of infinite refinement till it becomes 
purely spiritual. Between love as a natural im- 
pulse and love as a religious experience there are 
innumerable subtle gradations. Emerson's lines 
suggest the swiftness of the transitions. 
At first love is unmoral. 



"He is wilful, mutable, 
Shy, untamed, inscrutable, 
Swifter- fashioned than the fairies. 

5jC # # 

For Cupid goes behind all law. 

"There are impulses that are 
Restless, predatory, hasting; 
And they pounce on other eyes 
As lions on their prey. 
And round their circles is writ 
Plainer than the day, 
Underneath, within, above, — 
Love — love — love — love." 

Out of these primitive instincts arise the higher 
kinds of love. They do not develop in logical 



THE POET 89 

order. They are rather fierce and sudden pas- 
sions which, however, tend toward nobleness. 

"Man was made of social earth, 
Child and brother from his birth, 
Tethered by a liquid cord 
Of blood through veins of kindred 
poured." 

There is developed a loyalty to family and 
tribe. There come "throbs of a wild religion." 
There is 

"Beauty of a richer vein 
Graces of a subtler strain." 

After a time love is drawn to its object, not by 
a blind urgency, but a conscious choice. The 
lover is open-eyed. 

"He doth elect 

The beautiful and fortunate, 

And the sons of intellect, 

And the souls of ample fate, 

Who the Future's gate unbar." 

But this love with all its possibilities of 



90 EMERSON 

chivalry and romance is at heart selfish. It seeks 
its own, and scorns all else. 

"The Daemons are self-seeking, 
Their fierce and limitary will 
Draws men to their likeness still." 

There is a love that "delights to build a road," 
but "the Daemon ever builds a wall." That im- 
pulse which unites is met by an impulse which 
divides. So it happens that 

"Ever the Daemonic love 
Is the ancestor of wars/' 

But these partial preferences and passions do 
not exhaust the meaning of love. There is a 
celestial love. 

"But God said, 

T will have a purer gift, 

There is smoke in the flame/ " 

There is a love that is one with justice and 
truth. It is a passion still, but it is a passion for 
perfection. It comes with insight of a swifter 
kind. 



THE POET 91 

"Thou must mount for love 

Into vision where all form 

In one only form dissolves. 
* * # 

"Pray for a beam 

Out of that sphere, 

Thee to guide and to redeem. 

O, what a load of care and toil, 

By lying use bestowed, 

From his shoulders falls who sees 

The true astronomy." 

The love of the one becomes the symbol of 
good-will to all. 

"Not glad, as the low-loving herd, 
Of self in other still preferred, 
But they have heartily designed 
The benefit of broad mankind. 
And they serve men austerely, 
After their own genius, clearly, 
Without a false humility; 
For this is Love's nobility, — 
Not to scatter bread and gold, 
Goods and raiment bought and sold : 
But to hold fast his simple sense, 
And speak the speech of innocence, 
And with hand, and body, and blood, 
To make his bosom-counsel good. 
For he that feeds men serveth few ; 
He serves all who dares be true." 



92 EMERSON 

In all this Emerson is expressing his philos- 
ophy. But he does it not as a formal teacher, 
but as a poet. 

In the "Threnody," in which he sought com- 
fort after the death of a dearly loved child, there 
is the same sense of the quick transitions between 
the physical and the spiritual. He summons his 
faltering thought to follow his boy into the vast 
regions of the unknown. It is not a void but full 
of possibilities of life. 

"When frail Nature can no more, 
Then the Spirit strikes the hour : 
My servant Death, with solving rite, 
Pours finite into infinite." 

The loved form disappears, but the love goes on 
in search of its object. Change their must be, but 
change does not mean destruction of real values. 
Emerson finds strength in the thought that what 
is "excellent is permanent." And that perma- 
nence is not of form but of force. 

"Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow, 
Whose streams through nature circling go ? 



THE POET 93 

Nail the wild star to its track 

On the half-climbed zodiac? 

Light is light which radiates, 

Blood is blood wdiich circulates, 

Life is life which generates, 

And many-seeming life is one, — 

Wilt thou transfix and make it none? 

Its onward force too starkly pent 

In figure, bone, and lineament? 

Wilt thou, uncalled, interrogate, 

Talker ! the unreplying Fate ? 

Nor see the genius of the whole 

Ascendant in the private soul, 

Beckon it when to go and come, 

Self -announced its hour of doom? 

Fair the soul's recess and shrine, 

Magic-built to last a season; 

Masterpiece of love benign 

Fairer that expansive reason 

Whose omen 'tis, and sign. 

Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know 

What rainbows teach, and sunsets show ? 

Verdict which accumulates 

From lengthening scroll of human fates, 

Voice of earth to earth returned, 

Prayers of saints that inly burned, — 

Saying, What is excellent, 

As God lives, is permanent ; 

Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain, 

Heart's love will meet thee again 



94 EMERSON 

Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye 
Up to his style, and manners of the sky. 
Not of adamant and gold 
Built he heaven stark and cold; 
No, but a nest of bending reeds, 
Flowering grass, and scented weeds; 
Or like a traveller's fleeing tent, 
Or bow above the tempest bent ; 
Built of tears and sacred flames, 
And virtue reaching to its aims ; 
Built of furtherance and pursuing, 
Not of spent deeds, but of doing. 
Silent rushes the swift Lord 
Through ruined systems still restored, 
Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless, 
Plants with worlds the wilderness; 
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow 
Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow. 
House and tenant go to ground, 
Lost in God, in Godhead found." 



CHAPTER IX 



THE POETRY OF SCIENCE 



"Science always goes abreast with the just eleva- 
tion of the man keeping step with religion and meta- 
physics; or the state of science is an index of self- 
knowledge. Since everything in Nature answers to 
a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute 
and dark it is because the corresponding faculty in 
the observer is not yet active/' 

EMERSON'S idea of the scientific intelli- 
gence keeping step with the moral and spir- 
itual faculties is an illuminating one. It suggests 
to us what happened in the nineteenth century, 
and gave rise to so much confusion. 

The orderly progress of the human mind was 
broken up by the sudden and unprecedented ad- 
vance of the physical sciences. In a single gener- 
ation knowledge advanced with great leaps, which 
carried it into regions which had never before 
been entered. There w r as a penetrating power in 
the scientific method which amazed those who 

95 



96 EMERSON 

used it. The geologist, the chemist, the biologist, 
were daily enlarging the sphere of knowledge. 
Political economists were claiming the whole 
sphere of morals as their own. 

But all this progress was one-sided. Was the 
advance of scientific knowledge only another 
name for disenchantment? Was the bloom of 
the world to be brushed off, never more to re- 
turn? The poets and the artists and idealistic 
moralists were panic-stricken. Those who picture 
the mood of the so-called Victorian Age as one 
of smug complacency forget the predominant 
feeling of its men of literary and artistic genius. 
Ruskin, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold agree in la- 
menting the fact that "knowledge comes but wis- 
dom lingers." A glory had departed from the 
world. We are in danger, they thought, of know- 
ing too much. 

Matthew Arnold voiced this despondent moo3 
in his poem, "The Future." Man was born in a 
boat that floats upon the River of Time. At the 
beginning it was a clear flowing mountain stream, 



THE POETRY OF SCIENCE 97 

and looking out upon the romantic mountains the 
voyager's heart was full of joy. 

"As is the world on the banks 
So is the mind of the man." 

Our fathers lived in a world of poetry. Life to 
them was simple but full of mystery. It was easy 
to believe and wonder and enjoy. But the tract 
which the River of Time now flows through is 
the level plain, bordered by cities, crowded with 
traffic. Our world is prosaic, and we must adapt 
ourselves to it as best we may. All that remains 
is a melancholy resignation. 

It was against this mood of depression that 
Emerson always protested. The man of science, 
he says, does not divest the world of mystery. He 
does not "explain away" anything. His explana- 
tions are but the translating one mystery into 
another. His knowledge is never final. It re- 
veals deep behind deep. 

The trouble is with ourselves. We allow our 
imagination to grow torpid. In the processes of 



98 EMERSON 

nature are the materials not only for scientific 
investigation, but for poetry also. An evolving 
universe is a theme that can never be exhausted. 

Emerson had not the equipment of the man of 
science, but he had the imagination which sympa- 
thized with the tendencies of scientific investiga- 
tion. It seemed to him that they were confirma- 
tions of the intuition of the poets. That matter 
is not dead but thrilling with energy; that space 
is not empty but is the medium through which 
forces operate; that all things are related; that 
lower forms of life are always reaching out to- 
ward that which is higher; that there is a ten- 
dency for the organism to grow more complex 
and therefore more wonderful, — these were dis- 
coveries that ought to kindle the poetic imagina- 
tion. 

Emerson did not flatter himself that he had tHe 
ability to express the new view of the universe. 
The new poetry he believed would be realistic 
without losing its charm. 

"For it is dislocation and detachment from the 



THE POETRY OF SCIENCE 99 

life of God that makes things ugly. The poet 
who reattaches things to nature and the whole — 
reattaching even artificial things and violations of 
nature to nature by a deeper insight — disposes 
very easily of the most disagreeable facts." 

That to the true poet all things are poetical was 
a teaching that he repeats continually. It was 
this belief that made him greet Walt Whitman 
with such effusion. When in 1855 the "Leaves 
of Grass" appeared, the literary world was af- 
fronted. Whittier, it is said, threw his presenta- 
tion copy into the fire. Emerson, almost alone in 
his recognition of the new note, wrote, 

"I give you joy of your free and brave thought. 
I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things, 
said incomparably well, as they must be. I find 
the courage of treatment which so delights us, 
and which large perception only can give. I greet 
you at the beginning of a great career." 

But when Walt, in the exuberance of joy over 
the appreciation, published a new edition with 



100 EMERSON 

Emerson's commendation printed on the cover, 
the Concord poet was displeased. There were 
later interviews, but each man became conscious 
of the limitations of the other. "I was simmer- 
ing, simmering, simmering," said Whitman, "and 
Emerson brought me to boil." Emerson ap- 
proved the ideas which were simmering in the 
younger poet's mind, but when they actually 
boiled over he was inclined to get out of the way. 
This was not mere fastidiousness. It indicated a 
different conclusion drawn from what lawyers 
call "agreed facts." Walt Whitman expresses 
the creed of Emerson in his "Song of the Uni- 
versal :" 

"Come, said the Muse, 

Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted, 

Sing me the Universal. 

"In this broad earth of ours 
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, 
Enclosed and safe within its central heart 
Nestles the seed perfection. 

"By every life a share or more or less, 
None born but it is born concealed or 
Unconcealed the seed is waiting. 



THE POETRY OF SCIENCE 101 

"Over the mountain growths, disease and sorrow, 
An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering, 
High in the purer happier air. 

"From imperfection's murkiest cloud 

Darts always forth one ray of perfect light, 

One flash of heaven's glory. 

"To fashion's, custom's discords, 
To the mad Babel din, the deafening orgies, 
Soothing each lull a strain is heard, just heard, 
From some far shore the final chorus sounding. 

"O the blest eyes, the happy hearts, 

That see, that know the guiding thread so fine 

Along the mighty labyrinth." 

That spiritual realities are wrapped up in the 
material world, and that the seed of perfection 
may be found amid the apparent grossness of the 
earth, was a creed, which both poets fervently be- 
lieved. But what had it to do with the poet's art ? 

Whitman, in his robust faith that goodness 
was universal, felt relieved from the responsi- 
bility of choice. Nature had invited him to a 
feast of good things. He would take pot luck, 
and enjoy the rude plenty. This he conceived 



102 EMERSON 

to be the very essence of democracy. He would 
take good things in the bulk. 

Emerson also chanted the praise of the uni- 
versal, but with a somewhat different emphasis. 
He was interested in the grossness and the slag 
only for the sake of the seed perfection that lay 
hidden in it. It is the uncaught bird that flies 
above the mountain, it is the ray of perfect light 
that now and then flashes through the murky 
clouds, that must be the theme of poetry. The 
poet must follow the guiding thread or he is lost 
in the labyrinth. There must be discrimination. 
Nature has something more than fecundity. 
There is an austere rejection of the lower forms 
of life in favor of the higher. There is a con- 
tinual refinement going on. To interpret this side 
of nature is the function of art. In this discrim- 
ination he was in harmony with the scientific atti- 
tude. 

The man of science does not yield to an idle 
curiosity. He selects the objects of his study and 
the method to be used. The laboratory is not 
cluttered up with all the objects which a naturalist 



THE POETRY OF SCIENCE 103 

might encounter in his walks. Only such objects 
as are fitted for the purpose are selected. Should 
not the poet exercise the same kind of discrimina- 
tion? 

Whitman tells us how on Beacon Street in 
Boston he w r alked with Emerson for two hours, 
discussing their agreements and differences. 

"During these two hours he was the talker and 
I the listener. It was an argument, — statement, 
reconnoitering, review, attack and pressing home 
against all that could be said against my poems, — 
Children of Adam. Emerson's statement was 
unanswerable, no judge's charge ever more com- 
plete or convincing. I could never hear the points 
better put, — and then I felt down in my soul the 
clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, 
and pursue my own way." 

As between Emerson and Whitman as poets, 
it is not necessary for us to decide. Both stood 
in the presence of nature. Whitman delighted 
in its obvious aspects, its sheer bulk, its prodi- 



104 EMERSON 

gality, its endless variety. Emerson was more 
interested in the laws which it illustrated and 
the unseen forces which move it. He was listen- 
ing to the "chorus of the ancient causes." This 
is what made his words so precious to the men of 
science who in the nineteenth century were wag- 
ing a battle against ancient formulas which ob- 
scured the meaning of their researches. 

Professor Tyndall, in his famous address to 
the British Association in 1870, took his text 
from Emerson, to whom in many other places 
he acknowledged his indebtedness. His theme 
was "The Scientific Use of the Imagination," 
and he began by repeating Emerson's lines which 
I have already quoted, beginning : 

"If thou wouldst know the mystic song 
Chanted when the sphere was young." 

Here, he said, is the poetic expression of the 
spirit of modern science. 

In another essay, Professor Tyndall denies the 
common notion that advances in science are made 
simply by the patient pushing out of boundaries 



THE POETRY OF SCIENCE 105 

of knowledge according to a prosaic system. Be- 
yond the region of actual light where facts are 
clearly seen, there is a penumbral region. Here 
is a field where intuition goes in advance of 
knowledge. "Here the investigator proceeds by 
combining intuition and verification. He ponders 
the knowledge he possesses and tries to push it 
further; he guesses and checks his guess, he con- 
jectures and confirms or rejects his conjecture. 
. . . Thus the vocation of the true experiment- 
alist may be defined as the continued use of spir- 
itual insight, and its incessant correction and 
realization. His experiments constitute a body 
of which his purified intuitions are as it were the 
soul" 

Those "purified intuitions," which Tyndall de- 
clares constituted the very soul of science, were 
to Emerson the essence of poetry. What the 
scientist discovered to be true, the poet saw to be 
beautiful. Both recognized the fact that nature 
was not fixed but fluid. We see the successive 
phases of an endless genesis. 



106 EMERSON 

"The lover of nature is he whose inward and 
outward senses are still truly adjusted to each 
other; who has retained the spirit of infancy 
even into the era of manhood. His intercourse 
with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily 
food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight 
runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. 
Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre 
all his imperfect griefs, he shall be glad with me. 
Not the sun of the summer alone, but every hour 
and season yields its tribute of delight; for every 
hour and change corresponds to and authorizes 
a different state of the mind, from breathless 
noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting 
that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. 
In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible 
virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow- 
puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without 
having in my thoughts any occurrence of special 
good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilara- 
tion. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the 
woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake 
his slough, and at what period soever of life, is 



THE POETRY OF SCIENCE 107, 

always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. 
Within these plantations of God a decorum and 
sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and 
the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a 
thousand years. In the woods we return to 
reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can 
befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity (leav- 
ing me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. 
Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed 
by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, 
— all mean egotism vanishes. I become a trans- 
parent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the cur- 
rents of the Universal Being circulate through 
me; I am part or particle of God. The name of 
the nearest friend sounds then foreign and acci- 
dental! to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — 
master or servant is then a trifle and a dis- 
turbance. I am a lover of uncontained and im- 
mortal beauty. 5 * 



CHAPTER X 



PIETY 



"We love the venerable house 

Our fathers built to God; — 
In heaven are kept their grateful vows, 

Their dust endears the sod. 

"Here holy thoughts a light have shed 

From many a radiant face, 
And prayers of humble virtue made 

The perfume of the place. 

"And anxious hearts have pondered here 

The mystery of life, 
And prayed the eternal Light to clear 

Their doubts, and aid their strife. 

"From humble tenements around 

Came up the pensive train, 
And in the church a blessing found 

That filled their homes again; 

"For faith and peace and mighty love 
That from the Godhead flow, 

Showed them the life of Heaven above 
Springs from the life below. 

108 



PIETY 109 

"They live with God; their homes are dust; 

Yet here their children pray, 
And in this fleeting lifetime trust 

To find the narrow way. 

"On him who by the altar stands, 

On him thy blessing fall, 
Speak through his lips thy pure commands, 

Thou heart that lovest all." 

\ MONG the strange adventures of words, 
j\ which are continually losing their original 
meanings and taking up with new associations, 
there is none stranger than that of the word 
Piety. To the Romans it was preeminently a 
manly virtue. There was no suggestion of weak- 
ness about it. It represented the behavior of the 
strong man toward his parents, kinsmen, country 
or benefactors. It implied a fine courtesy and a 
sense of the fitness of things. There was a sober 
affection for all that was permanent in human re- 
lations. Antoninus Pius represented the kind of 
loyalty which the Romans most admired. 

It is this piety in the ancient sense which Emer- 
son's hymn represents. It is the very opposite of 
conventional pietism. To him the New England 



110 EMERSON 

meeting-house was venerable, because of its asso- 
ciations with what was most sacred and enduring 
in the life of his own people. Whittier himself 
has not expressed more tenderly his appreciation 
of the personal influences which have bound the 
generations together in common worship. 

The same note is sounded in the hymn sung at 
the completion of the Concord Monument, April 
19, 1836. 

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, 
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, 

Here once the embattled farmers stood, 
And fired the shot heard round the world. 

"The foe long since in silence slept ; 

Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; 
And Time the ruined bridge has swept 

Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. 

"On this green bank, by this soft stream, 

We set to-day a votive stone ; 
That memory may their deed redeem, 

When, like our sires, our sons are gone. 

"Spirit, that made those heroes dare 
To die, and leave their children free, 

Bid Time and Nature gently spare 
The shaft we raise to them and Thee." 



PIETY 111 

In the lines entitled "Grace" there is a recogni- 
tion of the debt which the individual owes to the 
society of which he is a part, and by which he is 
protected. 

"How much, preventing God how much I owe 
To the defences thou hast rDund me set; 
Example, custom, fear, occasion slow, — 
These scorned bondmen were my parapet. 
I dare not peep over this parapet 
To gauge which glance the roaring gulf below, 
The depth of sin to which I had descended 
Had not these me against myself defended." 

In considering the individualism of Emerson 
we have to take account of the fact that he never 
really broke with the past, nor did he consider it 
necessary to do so in order to achieve freedom. 
He acknowledged his indebtedness to those who 
had gone before him. But his reverence for their 
example led him not to stand perpetually where 
they stood ; but rather to go on in the same direc- 
tion in which they were going. 

All who heard Emerson in the pulpit bear wit- 
ness to the atmosphere of reverence which per- 



112 EMERSON 

vaded his utterances. One who listened to him 
writes : 

"One day there came into our pulpit the most 
gracious of mortals with a face all benignity who 
gave out the first hymn and made the first prayer 
as an angel might have read or prayed. Our 
choir was a pretty good one, but its best was 
coarse and discordant after Emerson's voice. I 
remember the sermon only that it had an in- 
definite charm of simplicity and wisdom, with oc- 
casional illustrations from Nature, which were 
about the most delicate and dainty things of the 
kind I had ever heard. I could understand them, 
if not the fresh philosophical novelties of the dis- 
course." 

Emerson was remarkably incurious in regard 
to the problems propounded by formal theolo- 
gians, but he was a profound believer in the re- 
ligion of experience. Piety, whether manifest 
toward God or man, was something altogether 
natural. 



PIETY 113 

"Ineffable is the union of man and God in 
every act of the soul. The simplest person, who 
in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet 
for ever and ever the influx of this better and 
universal self is new and unsearchable. It in- 
spires awe and astonishment. How dear, how 
soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling 
the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes 
and disappointments! When we have broken 
our god of tradition, and ceased from our god 
of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His 
presence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, 
nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a 
power of growth to a new infinity on every side. 
It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has not 
the conviction, but the sight, that the best is the 
true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all 
particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn 
to the sure revelation of time, the solution of his 
private riddles. He is sure that his welfare is 
dear to the heart of being. In the presence of 
law to his mind, he is overflowed with a reliance 
so universal that it sweeps away all cherished 



114 EMERSON 

hopes and the most stable projects of mortal con- 
dition in its flood. He believes that he cannot 
escape from his good. The things that are really 
for thee gravitate to thee. You are running to 
seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your 
mind need not. If you do not find him, will you 
not acquiesce that it is best that you should not 
find him? for there is a power, which, as it is in 
you, is in him also, and could therefore very well 
bring you together, if it were for the best. You 
are preparing with eagerness to go and render 
a service to which your talent and your taste in- 
vite you, the love of men and the hope of fame. 
Has it not occurred to you that you have no right 
to go unless you are equally willing to be pre- 
vented from going? O, believe, as thou livest, 
that every sound that is spoken over the round 
world, which thou ought to hear, will vibrate on 
thine ear ! Every proverb, every book, every by- 
word that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, 
shall surely come home through open or winding 
passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic 
will, but the great and tender heart in thee crav- 



PIETY 115 

eth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this, 
because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not 
a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there 
anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninter- 
ruptedly an endless circulation through all men, 
as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly 
seen, its tide is one." 



CHAPTER XI 

THOU SHALT NOT PREACH 

" 'A new commandment/ said the smiling Muse, 
'I give my darling son, Thou shalt not preach/ " 

IN one sense Emerson was always a preacher. 
His main interest was in the moral law and in 
the development of character. When he left the 
pulpit for the lecture platform he was only chang- 
ing one congregation for another. In the Uni- 
tarian ministry to which he belonged, the sermon 
and the essay were not always clearly differenti- 
ated. 

But in another sense Emerson obeyed the pro- 
hibition of the smiling muse. He had no genius 
for exhortation, nor had he any desire to enforce 
his precepts upon unwilling minds. He lacked 
the fervor of the true evangelist, and could not 
cry, "Turn ye! turn ye! why will ye die?" He 

116 



THOU SHALT NOT PREACH 117 

could not enforce the gospel of liberalism as did 
his friend, Theodore Parker. His attitude was 
like that of the man of science to the subject of 
his investigation. "Here is the truth as I see it. 
Now investigate it for yourselves and see what 
you think of it." 

In the Divinity School address, Emerson 
startled his hearers by a bold prophecy. 

"I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty 
which ravished the soul of these Eastern men, 
and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their 
lips spake oracles to all time, shall speak in the 
West also. The Hebrew and the Greek scriptures 
contain immortal sentences that have been the 
bread of life to millions. But they have no epical 
integrity, are fragmentary, are not shown in 
their order to the intellect. I look for the new 
Teacher that shall follow so far these shining 
laws that he shall see them come round full circle ; 
shall see? the world to be the mirror of the soul, 
shall see the identity of the law of gravitation 
with purity of heart; and shall show that the 



118 EMERSON 

Ought, that Duty is one thing with Science, with 
Beauty and Joy." 

"Virtue is vitiated," said Emerson, "by too 
much will. He who aims at progress should aim 
at an infinite not at a special benefit. The re- 
forms whose fame now fills the land with Tem- 
perance, Anti-slavery, Non-Resistance, no Gov- 
ernment, Equal Labor, fair and generous as each 
appears, are poor, bitter things when prosecuted 
for themselves as an end. » . * The soul can 
be appeased not by a deed, but by a tendency." 

The born preacher appeals to the will and seelcs 
to change its direction. He pleads and threatens. 
He is instant in season and out of season. Only 
on a few great occasions did Emerson adopt that 
tone. The greatest truths seemed to him to be 
self-evidencing. In their presence all minds were 
equal. "The weight of the universe is pressed 
down on the shoulders of each moral agent to 
hold him to his task." 

"Let us have nothing now but what is its own 
evidence. There is surely enough for the heart 



THOU SHALT NOT PREACH 119 

in the religion itself. Let us not be pestered with 
half-truths and assertion and snuffle. 

"There will be a new church founded on moral 
science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a 
manger again, the algebra and mathematics of 
ethical law, the church of men to come, without 
shawms, or psaltery, or sackbut ; but it will have 
heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; sci- 
ence for symbol and illustration; it will fast 
enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry. 
Was never stoicism so stern and exigent as this 
shall be. It shall send man home to his central 
solitude, shame these social, supplicating manners, 
and make him know that much of the time he 
must have himself to his friend. He shall expect 
no cooperation, he shall walk with no companion. 
Jhe nameless Thought, the nameless Power, the 
super-personal Heart, — he shall repose alone on 
that. He needs only his own verdict. No good 
fame can help, no bad fame can hurt him. The 
Laws are his consolers, the good Laws themselves 
are alive, they know if we have kept them, they 
animate him with the leading of great duty and 



120 EMERSON 

an endless horizon. Honor and fortune exist to 
him who always recognizes the neighborhood of 
the great, always feels himself in the presence of 
high causes." 

To all this the preacher might answer, "You 
have left out of your account something which is 
very important in human nature, namely, its 
weakness. The ordinary man lives amid the 
wonders of nature, but he may be very little 
affected by them. He needs some strong voice to 
urge him to open his eyes to what is around him. 
If it is so with the most obvious sights, is it not 
more so with moral and spiritual beauty ? Is not 
the preacher needed as well as the philosopher 
and poet?" 

No one would be more willing to acknowledge 
this than Emerson. His criticism of Plato would 
be equally true of himself. 

'Tlato, lover of limits, loved the illimitable, 
saw the enlargement and nobility that came from 
truth itself and good itself, and attempted as if 
on the part of the human intellect to do it ade- 



THOU SHALT NOT PREACH 121 

quate homage. ... It remains to say that the 
defect of Plato in power is only that which re- 
sults inevitably from his quality. He is intel- 
lectual in his aim, and therefore in expression 
literary. Mounting into heaven, diving into the 
pit, expounding the laws of the state, the passion 
of love, the remorse of crime, the hope of the 
parting soul, he is literary and never otherwise. 
It is almost the sole deduction from Plato that 
his writings have not — what is no doubt incident 
to this regnancy of intellect in his work — the 
vital authority which the screams of the prophets 
and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews 
possess. There is an interval; and to cohesion 
contact is necessary. ... I know not what 
can be said in reply to this criticism but that we 
have come to a fact in the nature of things; an 
oak is not an orange. The qualities of sugar re- 
main with sugar, and those of salt with salt." 



CHAPTER XII 



THE LURE OF THE WEST 



"If I had a pocket full of money I think 2 should 
go down the Ohio and up and down the Mississippi 
by way of antidote to what small remains of Orien- 
talism (so endemic in these parts) there may still be 
in me — to cast out, I mean, the passion for Europe, 
by the passion for America; and our reverence for 
Cambridge, which is only a part of our reverence 
for London, must be transferred across the Alle- 
ghany ridge." — Emerson to Margaret Fuller. 

NEW England has always been the home of 
an intense patriotism. [The spirit of 
Bunker Hill and Lexington Has never been 
quenched. Nor can it be said that any part of 
the country has sent out more men who have 
taken part in an effective way in large national 
enterprises. 

Yet in the days before the Civil War, when 
Boston became conscious of itself as a literary 
center, it was open to the charge of not having 

122 



THE LURE OF THE WEST 123 

yet discovered America. It belonged to a New 
England that still looked to Old England for its 
models. This, I take it, was always true more of 
the literary circles than of the mass of the people, 
but it was that which determined the admiration 
of those who aspired to "culture." As Daniel in 
Babylon prayed with his windows opened toward 
Jerusalem, so the Boston literati, when they took 
pen in hand, wrote with their study windows 
open toward London. As to what was happening 
in the great hinterland beyond the Hudson, they 
cared little. And the people in the hinterland, 
who were so busy opening up the resources of 
the continent that they hadn't time to be 
literary, resented in a good-natured way the Bos- 
tonian attitude. It had that "certain condescen- 
sion" which Lowell resented on the part of Euro- 
peans, but from which he and his friends were not 
altogether free when they encountered the repre- 
sentative men of the West. 

I think it is fair to say that Emerson did more 
than any one else to redeem the New England 
group of authors from the kind of provincialism 



124 EMERSON 

which was their darling sin. He did it in a two- 
fold way: first, by attacking their imitation of 
things English, and then by inculcating a hearty 
admiration for the America that was growing up 
in the West. 

In "English Traits" he pays tribute to the 
sturdy virtues of the English character and the 
wealth of English talent. But he insists on treat- 
ing England not as the Mother Country, but as a 
different country, — as different as France or Italy. 
He admires it, but it is with a critical detachment. 
Hawthorne wrote of England as The Old Home. 
Emerson had very little of the Old Home idea. 
There were ties of deep friendship, but he recog- 
nized that the genius of Britain and the genius of 
America were different. He admired the differ- 
ences. 

"The wealth of the source is seen in the pleni- 
tude of English nature. What variety of power 
and talent, what facility and plenteousness of 
knighthood, lordship, ladyship, royalty, loyalty; 
what a proud chivalry is indicated in 'Collin's 



THE LURE OF THE WEST 125 

peerage' through eight hundred years. What 
dignity resting on what reality and stoutness. 
What courage in war, what sinew in labor, what 
cunning unknown, what inventors and engineers, 
what seamen and pilots, what clerks and 
scholars." 

But this admiration has nothing in it of the 
provincial's attitude to the greatness and privilege 
of those who belong to the capital. Had one said, 
"Go thou and do and be likewise," Emerson 
would not have budged an inch. His attitude 
toward the sturdy Englishman would be like his 
attitude toward the Churchman : 

*T like a church, I like a cowl, 
I love a prophet of the soul, 

Yet not for all his faith can see 
Would I that cowled churchman be." 

Emerson had an admiration for the true-born 
Englishman, but not for the anglicized Ameri- 
can. He believed in culture, but there must be 
an American culture that must grow out of the 



126 EMERSON 

conditions of our own life. In his lines entitled 
"Culture" he defined the cultivated man as one 
who 

"To his native center fast, 
Shall into Future fuse the Past, 
And the world's flowing fates in his 
own mould recast." 

And when he thought of the world's flowing 
fates, his mind turned westward. There great 
things were happening. A new civilization was be- 
ing created. There was nothing condescending in 
the attitude of the thinker to these men of action, 
who on an unparalleled stage were beginning a 
new act. 

Against the fastidious critics of Boston, Emer- 
son defends the rough and ready men of the 
West, who were already making their influences 
felt in politics. 

"As long as our people quote English standards, 
they dwarf their own proportions. A Western 
lawyer of eminence said to me he wished it were 
a penal offence to bring an English lawbook into 
court in this country, so pernicious had he found 



THE LURE OF THE WEST 127 

in his experience our deference to English prece- 
dent. The very word commerce has only an 
English meaning and is pinched to the cramp 
exigencies of English experience. The commerce 
of rivers, the commerce of railroads, and who 
knows but the commerce of air balloons must 
give an American extension to the pond-hole of 
admiralty. As long as our people quote English 
standards, they will miss the sovereignty of 
power." 

Even before the Civil War Emerson dis- 
cerned clearly the significance of the Middle West 
and the great part it was destined to play in the 
development of civilization. The old thirteen 
states had a tradition that was essentially British. 
The great states which had been established in 
the Mississippi valley were in their origin purely 
American. There was no colonial background to 
their history. Here the pioneer spirit had de- 
veloped freely. It was the spirit of Daniel Boone 
and Davy Crockett and Peter Cartwright. 

Emerson reminds his fastidious friends that 
there is an explosive energy in young America. 



128 EMERSON 

"Men of this surcharge of arterial blood can- 
not live on nuts and herb tea and elegies, cannot 
read novels and play whist, cannot satisfy all 
their wants at the Thursday lecture or the Boston 
Athenaeum. They pine for adventure, and must 
go to Pikes Peak, had rather die of the hatchet of 
a Pawnee than sit all day and every day at a 
counting-room desk. They are made for war, 
for the sea, for mining, hunting and clearing, 
for hairbreadth adventures, huge risks and ad- 
venturous living. . . . Their friends and 
governors must see that some vent for their ex- 
plosive complexion is provided. The roisterers 
who are destined for infamy at home will cover 
you with glory and come back heroes and gen- 
erals. There are Oregons, Calif ornias and explor- 
ing expeditions enough appertaining to America 
to find them in files to gnaw and crocodiles to 
eat" 

Emerson could not satisfy all his wants in the 
Boston Athenaeum or the Saturday Club. Every 
year he escaped from his neighbors for a lecture 



THE LURE OF THE WEST 129 

tour in the West. It was before the days of the 
Pullman car, and traveling in interior America 
meant roughing it. 

He did not put on any airs as a missionary of 
culture. He could not make a living as a writer 
of books. He must earn something as an itiner- 
ant lecturer. 

"It comes to this. I'll bet you fifty dollars a 
day for three weeks that you will not leave your 
library and wade and freeze and ride and run, 
and suffer all manner of indignities, and stand up 
for an hour every night reading in a hall ! I bet 
I will. I do it and win the nine hundred dollars." 

The ways of the lecturer were not always 
pleasant. "Two nights in a rail car and a third 
on the floor of a canal boat, where the cushion 
allowed me for a bed was crossed at the knees 
by another tier of sleepers as long-limbed as I, 
so that the air was a wreath of legs." 

In 1853 he writes from Springfield, Illinois, 
"Here I am in .the deep mud of the prairies. Jt 



130 EMERSON 

rains and thaws incessantly and if we step off a 
short street we go up to the shoulders perhaps in 
mud. My chamber is a cabin, my fellow- 
boarders are legislators. Two or three governors 
or ex-governors live in the house. But in the 
prairie we are all new men, and must not stand 
on trifles." 

In mid-winter he makes this entry in his 
journal : "My chief adventure was the necessity 
of riding in a buggy forty-eight miles to Grand 
Rapids; then after lecture twenty more in return, 
and the next morning back to Kalamazoo in time 
for the train hither at twelve." This was at a 
time when Kalamazoo was a name strange to 
Bostonian ears. 

It was not comfortable traveling through bliz- 
zards to discourse to audiences which gathered 
in chilly or stuffy halls, but it was interesting. 
"Here is America in the making, America in the 
raw. But it does not want much to go to lecture, 
and 'tis a pity to drive it." 

It is only fair to add that Emerson's apprecia- 
tion of the new West was intellectual rather than 



THE LURE OF THE WEST 131 

intimately social. He saw it in the large, and 
treated it in a symbolic way. He saw the sig- 
nificance of the western man's boastfulness over 
the growth of the country. He liked to watch 
towns grow. He would have delighted in the 
Chicago man's remark that when Chicago turned 
to culture it would make culture hum. That was 
after Emerson's own heart, and it was that spirit 
which he wished to infuse into his well-beloved 
Boston. 

In 1839 he writes, "It is a sort of maxim with 
me never to harp on the omnipotence of limita- 
tions. Least of all do we need any suggestion 
of checks and measures, as if New England were 
anything else. . . . Our virtue runs in a nan 
row rill, we have never a freshet. One woul(| 
like to see Boston and Massachusetts agitated 
like a wave with some generosity, mad for learn- 
ing, for music, for philanthropy, for freedom, 
for art. We have insight and sensibility enough 
if we had constitution enough." 

The old Puritan capital of Massachusetts has 
become a great cosmopolitan city, and what were 



132 EMERSON 

then raw towns of the West are to-day making 
culture hum, but it is interesting to read Emer- 
son's judgments. He insisted that the rough 
work which the pioneers were doing, clearing the 
forest, building railroads, laying out cities and 
incidentally speculating in corner lots did not 
indicate that they were materialistic. They were 
idealists of an heroic sort. They were big men 
doing big things. The amenities would come in 
time. The fierce energy with which they did 
their work would be turned at length to the finer 
arts. He greeted them as the makers of a new 
civilization. The men of the West knew all this 
before. But they were glad to have Mr. Emerson 
come out and confirm them in their splendid an- 
ticipations. 



CHAPTER XIII 



emerson's elusive smile 



"Uprose the merry Sphinx 
And crouched no more in stone" 



IT was only the accident of local contiguity that 
made Doctor Holmes attempt a biography of 
Emerson. The men were altogether unlike, and 
their minds seldom met. Emerson's mysticism 
was to Holmes an intellectual frailty to be 
covered over by a friendly apology. But the 
doctor, though averse to transcendentalism, was 
a good judge of wit and humor. He tells us that 
no one can fully appreciate Emerson who has 
not seen the quick smile w r ith which he read pas- 
sages which his sober-minded disciples took as 
oracles to be pondered, while to him they were 
flashes of wit. 

Emerson certainly had wit, but he was not 
witty in the ordinary sense, nor did he really 

133 



134 EMERSON 

enjoy the broader kinds of humor. He tells us 
how he went with little Waldo to the circus and 
they enjoyed themselves hugely till the clown 
came out to perform his antics. Waldo whis- 
pered, "The funny man makes me want to go 
home." His father adds that he was of his 
opinion. It was a sore trial to him, therefore, 
when in his lectures he was sometimes expected 
to play the funny man. In preparing them for 
the press he, to the disappointment of some of 
his friends, cut out the enlivening anecdotes which 
his more austere taste disapproved. 

Play of wit there was, but it was a game of 
solitaire. The great wits like Sidney Smith need 
antagonists and spectators for their play. Theirs 
is the quick give and take, or the unexpected 
word that sets the table in a roar. Emerson, as 
we have seen, was strangely deficient in conver- 
sational aptitude, and had no power of repartee. 
He complains of the way in which he was put 
down by clever talkers. "A snipper snapper eats 
me whole." 

Many of those who had been attracted by his 



EMERSON'S ELUSIVE SMILE 135 

writings were disappointed when they came to 
him to talk over the subjects which he had sug- 
gested. They found it hard to get at him. Henry 
James, the elder, declares that he knew of no one 
"whose conversation was less remunerative." 

Emerson's wit was, to use William Penn's 
phrase, "the fruit of solitude." It was produced 
by collisions of thought that took place in his 
own mind, these happenings having no particu- 
lar relation to time or place. They are "the smile 
of reason" over the incongruities developed in 
the course of human reasoning. 

It was a part of Emerson's philosophy. To 
him the man thinking was like a schoolboy with 
lexicon and grammar trying to read a Latin 
classic. It is hard work, and the schoolboy 
frowns as he bends to the task. The frown indi- 
cates his grim determination, which is a good 
sign. He is making hard work of it, will learn 
the lesson in time. But his serious demeanor indi- 
cates also that he does not yet know the meaning 
of the words he is painfully puzzling over. For 
they were written in lighter vein and contain a 



136 EMERSON 

merry jest. When the meaning flashes forth, the 
words are forgotten, and the boy smiles under- 
standingly. 

Emerson's quick but illusive smile came when 
he perceived the meaning of something which had 
seemed to be meaningless. The riddle of ex- 
istence seems to most men the cause of futile 
effort to understand. The sphinx is a very 
solemn character indeed. To Emerson the 
mystery was not a cause of complaint. He sus- 
pected the sphinx of practical jokes. She was 
concealing something from us. 

"I heard a poet answer 

Aloud and cheerfully, 
'Say on, sweet Sphinx ! thy dirges 

Are pleasant songs to me. 
Deep love lieth under 

These pictures of time; 
That fade in the light of 

Their meaning sublime/ " 

When thus challenged 

"The old Sphinx bit her thick lip,— 
Said, 'Who taught thee me to name ? 

I am thy spirit, yoke- fellow, 
Of thine eye I am eyebeam/ " 



EMERSON'S ELUSIVE SMILE 137 

Then the frowning face gave way to a smile, 
and "up rose the merry sphinx 5 and crouched no 
more in stone," 

The conception of a "merry sphinx" is de- 
liciously Emersonian. The tables are turned upon 
the bitter satirist. The satirist smiles when he 
sees the incongruity between what men expect 
and what they actually receive, between what 
they profess to be and what they are. In all this 
it is assumed that the reality is worse than the 
expectation. Things are not what they seem. 

Quite so, says Emerson, but they are not al- 
ways worse than they seem. They are often 
infinitely better than they seem. We are all the 
time entertaining angels unawares. We are dull 
creatures, and are slow to recognize our betters. 
If it is amusing to unmask a hypocrite, is it not 
still more amusing to discover that the common- 
place individual whom we have been patronizing 
is really a king in disguise? 

"Seek not beyond thy cottage wall 
Redeemers that can yield thee all, 
While thou sittest at the door 
On the desert's yellow floor, 



138 EMERSON 

Listening to the grey-haired crones, 
Saadi, see ! they rise in stature 
To the height of mighty Nature, 
And the secret stands revealed. 
Fraudulent Time in vain concealed, — 
The blessed gods in servile masks 
Plied for thee thy household tasks." 

And when the performance does not come up 
to the expectation, the sudden discovery is not 
always unpleasant. 

"The essence of all jokes, of all comedy seems 
to be an honest and well-intentioned half-ness, a 
non-performance of what is intended to be per- 
formed. The balking of the intellect, the frus- 
trated expectation, the break of the continuity 
in the intellect is comedy." 

Emerson was very seldom known to laugh 
outright, and indeed rather disliked that explo- 
sion. But he was exceedingly sensitive to "breaks 
in the continuity of the intellect." His mind was 
naturally logical. If this be so, that will follow, 
he argued. But he was quick-witted to see that 
sometimes the thing which he expected did not 



EMERSON'S ELUSIVE SMILE 139 

follow. He could not help but smile at the con- 
tradiction to his logic. 

"This is the radical joke of life and then of 
literature. The presence of the ideal of right 
and truth in all action makes the yawning delin- 
quencies of practice remorseful to the conscience, 
tragic to the interest, but droll to the intellect. ,, 

This intellectual perception is necessary for 
our sanity. 

"We have no deeper interest than our integrity, 
and that we should be aware by joke and by stroke 
of any lie we entertain. Besides, a perception of 
the comic seems a balance wheel in our meta- 
physical structure. It appears to be an essential 
element in a fine character. Wherever the intel- 
lect is constructive it will be found. We feel the 
absence of it as a defect in the noblest and most 
oracular soul. The perception of the comic is a 
tie of sympathy with other men, and a protection 
from those perverse tendencies and gloomy in- 
sanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose 



140 EMERSON 

themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still 
convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow men 
can do little for him." 

The rogue who can laugh at himself may be 
converted. But the sentimentalist who takes him- 
self too seriously is in an unsalvable condition. 

"Society is infested by persons who, seeing that 
the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression 
of them. These we call sentimentalists — talkers 
who mistake the description for the thing, saying 
for having. They have, they tell us, an intense 
love of nature; poetry; O they adore poetry and 
roses and the moon, and the cavalry regiment, 
and the governor; they "dear liberty;" they wor- 
ship virtue — "dear virtue." Yes, they adopt 
whatever merit is in good repute, and almost 
make it hateful with their praise. The warmer 
their expressions, the colder we feel; we shiver 
with cold. A little experience acquaints us with 
the inconvertibility of the sentimentalist, the soul 
ithat is lost by mimicking soul. Cure the drunk- 



EMERSON'S ELUSIVE SMILE 141 

ard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize 
the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for 
the debauchee of sentiment? Was ever one con- 
verted?" 

It happened that Emerson attracted many of 
these sentimentalists and he was not unconscious 
of the humor of the situation. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE QUIET REVOLUTIONIST 

"The Past has baked my loaf, and in the strength 
of its bread I break up the old oven/' 

— Emerson's Journal. 

IT is not easy for some people to understand 
Emerson's attitude toward the revolutionary- 
forces that are all the time threatening the sta- 
bility of society. One can appreciate the fierce 
energy of the revolutionist who, believing that 
the social structure is altogether bad, seeks to 
destroy it. On the other hand, there are those 
who look with alarm at every project that involves 
radical change. 

But here was a quiet householder who habit- 
ually uttered the most revolutionary sentiments 
as if they were the most natural thoughts in the 
world. Of course the institutions which we see 
around us are not permanent. They are not the 
real things with which we have to do. They are 

142 



THE QUIET REVOLUTIONIST 143 

the results of what took place yesterday; they are 
yielding to what is taking place to-day. The only 
reality is the force which makes and unmakes 
them. Laws, customs, constitutions, churches, 
are the results of the revolutionary impulse in 
man. They are the temporary embodiments of 
restless thought. Everything follows thought. 
You think of armies, and priesthoods, and courts 
of justice, as necessities. Yes, they are neces- 
sities of thought. Change the thought and they 
change their form. The temple that seems to 
have grown out of the solid earth has in reality 
grown out of the vague aspirations of the wor- 
shipper. It grew as the tree grows, through a 
power of working from within. It was built as 
the bird builds its nest, through an instinct which 
was irresistible. 



"Know'st thou what wove yon woodbird's nest 
Of leaves, and feathers from her breast? 
Or how the fish outbuilt her shell, 
Painting with morn each annual cell? 
Or how the sacred pine tree adds 
To her old leaves new myriads ? 



144 EMERSON 

Such and so grew these holy piles, 
Whilst love and terror laid the tiles. 
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon, 
As the best gem upon her zone, 
And morning opes with haste her lids 
To gaze upon the Pyramids ; 
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky, 
As on its friends, with kindred eye ; 
For out of Thought's interior sphere 
There wonders rose to upper air." 

One might watch the face of a man in the act 
of thinking. As one thought follows another, 
the mobile features change. Nerves and muscles 
respond to the impulses from within. The lips 
curve now downward, now upward, the cheeks 
quiver, the eyes dilate and then close, tell-tale 
wrinkles appear upon the forehead, the chin 
grows firm and then is relaxed, the pose of the 
head is now defiant and again it droops. The 
man is lost in thought, and unconscious of how 
he appears. To him the thought is all. 

Two painters may be watching him. One is a 
literalist. To him the pose and features are every- 
thing. He imagines himself to be a realist, and 
his ambition is to portray the man as he actually 



THE OUIET REVOLUTIONIST 145 

is. Now it is obviously impossible literally to put 
all the changing expressions on a single canvas. 
So what the painter does is to seize one attitude 
and treat it as if it were permanent. The result 
is something hard and unyielding. We recognize 
the likeness, but there is no suggestion of the 
possibility of a change of mood. It is not, as we 
say, a speaking likeness. 

The other painter is a real artist. To him the 
features are quivering with expression, and the 
expression changes at every instant. He sees his 
subject as alive. The smile, the frown, the tense 
muscles all mean something. They indicate what 
the man is thinking about. The shape and poise 
of the head tell whether nature has endowed him 
with the capacity to have thoughts that are signi- 
ficant. The aim of the artist is first to get inside 
the man's mind and then to interpret that mind 
through the outward features. 

If he succeeds, we say his picture is alive. The 
limitation of his art demands that he shall present 
only the attitude of a single moment, but we per- 
ceive that attitude is about to change. He is in 



146 EMERSON 

the act of doing something, and there is on our 
part a feeling of expectancy. The orator's lips 
are mobile, he is about to speak. The soldier's 
hand is on his sword, he is about to grasp it 
firmly and wield it with all his might. It is al- 
ways the suggestion of something that is coming 
that marks the work of genius. 

Now there are two ways of looking at human 
institutions, — from without or from within. We 
may look at laws and customs as if they were 
fixed and final. They are the features of a giant 
carved in stone. We may be idolaters of the 
existing order, worshipping the carved image. 
Or we may be iconoclasts, ready to give it a 
smashing blow. 

But to one who seeks to look at it all from 
within, the institutions represent but the transi- 
tory glory of features of the Great Being. The 
Great Being is thinking, he is dreaming of things 
to come, he is planning his dwelling place upon 
earth. The thoughts come thick and fast, and 
the acts follow each after its kind. 

Humanity, conceived of as a great composite 



THE QUIET REVOLUTIONIST 147 

being, of which we are parts, is all alive and 
quivering with aspiration. It is never satisfied 
with the work of its own hands, and it never 
gives up working. Thousands of human beings 
are at a given time impelled by one spirit, and co- 
operate to one end. Their actions are not rational 
in the sense that each individual is able to give a 
reason, or least the right reason, for what he 
does. And yet the process, looked at as a whole, 
is not irrational. There is some big thought behind 
it all, of which all the action is expressive. Give 
us time and we can see the outlines of the thought. 
Humanity is thinking. It is storing up ex- 
perience. It is a creative force. Even what we 
call matinalistic progress, is itself but the follow- 
ing of an idea. 

"And what if Trade sow cities 

Like shells along the shore, 
And thatch with towns the prairie broad 

With railways ironed o'er? 
They are but sailing foam bells 

Along Thought's causing stream, 
And take their shape and sun color 

From him that sends the dream." 



148 EMERSON 

The historian tells of the Roman Empire, Feud- 
alism, the Crusades, the French Revolution* 
These are tremendous facts. But the facts mean 
nothing till we see them as the expression of suc- 
cessive states of mind. Royalty as an institution 
is incredible to the born democrat who is without 
imagination, and who does not take the trouble to 
ask how the loyal subject feels toward his 
anointed king. And democracy is an empty 
name to one who has never felt the thrill of the 
idea that lies behind it. 

In looking back from the vantage ground of 
several centuries, it is possible to see how a gener- 
ation of men may be obsessed by an idea that 
determines all their achievements. We may see 
that idea lose hold upon the mind of the next 
generation, and lo all the mighty works lose all 
interest. It is as if one moment we saw the face 
of the Great Being all aquiver with interest. Then 
suddenly the light fades and he turns away from 
the work of his own hands. 

But it is not so easy to realize that the mighty 
works of our own day owe their existence, and 



THE QUIET REVOLUTIONIST 149 

depend for their security on the same transitory 
support of thought. They represent our present 
thinking, and when we come to think differently 
they will disappear. 

"Ah," but we say, "we go down to hard facts. 
We build upon the granite of actuality, not on 
anything so unsubstantial as mere thought." 

Emerson would answer. "You think of the 
granite mountain peak as unchanging. Ask the 
geologist to tell you what he knows about Monad- 
nock. To him the mountain does not seem very 
old. Its present form is but a transitory thing. 
It is but a bubble upon the earth that is sailing 
through stars with all its history." 

The poet who has learned the lesson of geology 
hears the mountain confess its own instability. 

"Let him heed who can and will ; 

Enchantment fixed me here 

To stand the hurts of time, until 

In loftier chant I disappear. 

If thou trowest 

How the chemic eddies play, 

Pole to pole, and what they say ; 

And that these gray crags 



150 EMERSON 

Not on crags are hung, 
But beads are of a rosary 
On prayer and music strung ; 
And, credulous, through the granite seem- 
ing, 
Seest the smile of Reason beaming; — 

• • • 

"Knowest thou this ? 

pilgrim, wandering not amiss ! 
Already my rocks lie light, 
And soon my cone will spin." 

Older than the mountain is the power from 
which it sprang. And that power is only inter- 
preted by Thought. 

"Monadnock is a mountain strong, 
Tall and good my kind among; 
But well I know, no mountain can, 
Zion or Meru, measure with man. 
For it is on zodiacs writ 
Adamant is soft to wit : 
And when the greater comes again 
With my secret in his brain, 

1 shall pass, as glides my shadow 
Daily over hill and meadow/' 

"When the greater comes again." That was 
what Emerson was always murmuring to himself. 
The greatness that he recognized was the great- 
ness of thought. 



THE QUIET REVOLUTIONIST 151 

He was therefore always eager to meet men 
who were dissatisfied with existing things and 
making plans for betterment. He received them 
hospitably, he listened sympathetically. That 
their schemes involved radical changes did not 
frighten him. It seemed to be in the order of 
nature. 

But he always applied the same test. It was 
not enough that their proposal should be for 
something different. It must also be something 
greater, and the greater includes the less. When 
the greater thought comes, it shall make us under- 
stand and appreciate the good that already exists. 
It will make universal what is now partial. The 
"song of Human progress" he expresses in the 
song of nature. 

"I wrote the past in characters 
Of rock and fire the scroll, 
The building of the coral sea, 
The planting of the coal. 

"Let war and trade and creeds and song 
Blend, ripen race on race, 
The sunburnt world a man shall breed 
Of all the zones and countless days. 



152 EMERSON 

"No ray is dimmed, no atom worn, 
My oldest force is good as new, 
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn 
Gives back the bending heavens in dew." 

Notice the way in which the view of nature 
and the hopes for human nature are blended. Out 
of a few ancient elements, nature is continually 
making new and amazing combinations. Nothing 
is destroyed, everything is transformed. The 
same conservation of energy he discerns in hu- 
manity. The elements of character are old as 
the race, but no one can prophesy what new per- 
fection can be obtained from them. 

One may see Emerson's thought best by con- 
trasting it with that of a poet whose mind turned 
toward the same subject. Wordsworth and 
Emerson both loved to personify nature, and in 
communion with nature they found refreshment 
of spirit. But Emerson, who was not accustomed 
to use terms of disparagement, sometimes spoke 
more harshly of Wordsworth than of any other 
modern English poet. 

The fact was that the two men looked at nature 



THE QUIET REVOLUTIONIST 153 

with quite different eyes. To Wordsworth, na- 
ture was the arch conservative. Over against 
the vain commotion of humankind was the great 
brooding presence of a power that could be relied 
upon because it was ever the same. And after 
his first fever of revolutionary ardor, Words- 
worth returned to nature as to a refuge from all 
innovations. Here was the calm of an established 
order, and the more nearly human institutions 
conformed to this stability, the better for them. 

To Emerson, nature was not the symbol of 
what is unchanging; it was eager, flashing, eva- 
nescent, infinitely suggestive. It was never the 
same. When it seemed the same it was only 
because our eyes are so dull that we can not catch 
all the transitions. 

And that which helps us in our contact with 
the natural world is not its soothing lullabys. It 
is the challenge which comes to join in the quick 
and rude play of the forces which are creating 
and recreating the world. Come out-of-doors, 
the voice cries, and know what it is to live. 



154 EMERSON 

" 'Bookworm, leave thy sloth urbane, 
A greater spirit bids thee forth 
Than the gray dreams that thee detain. 
Mark how the climbing Oreads 
Beckon thee to their arcades, 
Youth, for a moment free as they, 
Teach thy feet to feel the ground 
Ere yet arrives the wintry day 
When Time thy feet has bound. 
Take the bounty of thy birth 
Taste the Lordship of the earth/ 

"I heard, and I obeyed, — 
Assured that he who made the claim 
Well known, but loving not a name, 
Was not to be gainsaid/' 

Nature does not rebuke our impatience when 
we break up old forms in order to make better. 
She is our accomplice, and conspires with us. 
We misrepresent her when we try to imitate her. 
Only in some stroke of originality do we accept 
her challenge. To see only repetition in nature 
is not to see at all. 



"Alas, thine is the bankruptcy, 
Blessed nature so to see. 



THE QUIET REVOLUTIONIST, 155 

"Behind thee leave thy merchandise, 
Thy churches and thy charities, 
And leave thy peacock wit behind. 
Enough for thee the primal mind 
That flows in streams, that breathes in wind. 
Leave all thy pedant lore apart ; 
God hid the whole world in thy heart. 
Love shuns the sage, the child it crowns, 
Gives all to them who all renounce. 
The rain comes when the wind calls, 
The river knows the way to the sea, 
Without a pilot it runs and falls, 
Blessing all lands with its charity. 
The sea tosses and foams to find 
Its way up to the cloud and wind. 
The shadow sits close to the flying ball, 
The date fails not on the palm tree tall, 
And thou, — go burn thy wormy pages, — 
Shalt outsee seers and outwit sages." 

That which he saw in nature he saw in every 
human effort that was free and spontaneous. He 
loved to call it the Newness. The Newness is that 
"which reconciles impossibilities, atones for short- 
comings, expiates sins or makes them virtues, 
buries in oblivion the crowded historical past, 
sinks religions, philosophies, persons to legends, 
reverses the score of opinion of fame, reduces 



156 EMERSON 

science to opinion, and makes the thought of the 
moment the key to the universe and the egg of 
history to come. 55 

"The Divine Newness. Hoe and spade, sword 
and pen, pictures, gardens, laws, bibles and prizes, 
only they were means He sometimes used. So 
with astronomy, music, arithmetic, castes, feud- 
alism — we kiss with devotion these hems of His 
garment. We mistake them for Him, they 
crumble in ashes on our lips/ 5 

To the worshipper of the Divine Newness, there 
was nothing terrible in the voices of eager in- 
novators, for innovation is in the order of nature, 
and "the good human race outlives them all, and 
forever in the heart abides the old sovereign senti- 
ment requiring justice and good- will to all, and 
rebuilds the decayed temples, and with new names 
chants again the praises of Eternal Right." 

"The idea which now begins to agitate society 
has a wider scope than our daily employments, 
our households and the institutions of property. 



THE QUIET REVOLUTIONIST 157 

We are to revise the whole of our social structure, 
the state, the school, religion, marriage, trade, 
science, and explore their foundations in our own 
nature ; we are to see that the world not only fitted 
the former men, but fits us, and to clear ourselves 
of every usage which has not its roots in our own 
mind. What is a man born for but to be a Re- 
former, a Re-maker of what man has made; a re- 
nouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, 
imitating that great Nature which embosoms us 
all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, 
but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every 
morning a new day, and with every pulsation a 
new life? Let him renounce everything which 
is not true to him, and put all his practices back 
on their first thoughts, and do nothing for which 
he has not the whole world for his reason. If 
there are inconveniences, and what is called ruin 
in the way, because we have so enervated and 

m 

maimed ourselves, yet it would be like dying of 
perfumes to sink in the effort to re-attach the 
deeds of every day to the holy and mysterious re- 
cesses of life." 



CHAPTER XV 

MEDITATIONS ON POLITICS 

"In dealing with the State, we ought to remember 
that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they 
existed before we were born; that they are not su- 
perior to the citizen, that every one of them was the 
act of a single man, every law and usage was a 
man's expedient to meet a particular case" 

WHAT has been said of Emerson's faith 
in the "Divine Newness" must be taken 
into account when we read his essay on politics. 
Like the Epistles of St. Paul, it contains some 
things hard to be understood, "which they that are 
unlearned and unstable wrest to their own destruc- 
tion." I have seen an anarchistic pamphlet which 
was made up almost entirely of quotations from 
Emerson. 

Indeed, on the face of it, it appears to be an 
argument not only against political parties, but 
against government in general. This is because 
doubt is thrown upon what we usually call the 

158 



MEDITATIONS ON POLITICS 159 

foundations of organized society. Emerson did 
not believe that government trad any foundations. 
He did not think of it as a building solidly resting 
upon a rock, and where one stone is fitted upon 
another. He thought of the state as a living body 
perpetually being renewed and having a power of 
motion. This organism so long as it is healthy 
can adapt itself to all kinds of conditions. The 
aim of politics is not to prevent change, but to 
prevent stagnation, which is death. 

Before reading Emerson on Politics, read 
Burke's wonderful tributes to the British Consti- 
tution and diatribes on the French Revolution. 
To Burke the British Constitution was a stately 
English mansion. It was the home of ordered 
Liberty. Generations have worked upon this 
mighty edifice. It was founded by the fathers; 
the new generations could add to it. But let no 
vandal attempt to dislodge one stone. It must be 
preserved in all its original beauty. The institu- 
tion once formed became itself the object of pious 
solicitude. It was not a tool to be used, but a 
sacred symbol of the nation's life. 



160 EMERSON 

Emerson did not feel that any political institu- 
tion had such sanctity as that. "To the young 
citizen/' he says, "organized society lies in rigid 
repose, men and institutions rooted like oak trees 
to the center around which all arrange themselves 
as best they can. But the old statesman knows 
that society is fluid; there are no such roots and 
centers, but any particle may suddenly become 
the center of the movement and compel the system 
to gyrate around it." 

"That kind of government which prevails is 
the expression of what cultivation exists in the 
society which permits it. The law is only a 
memorandum. We are superstitious and esteem 
the statute somewhat. So much life as it has in 
the character of living men is its force." 

He then considers the two objects for which 
governments exist — persons and property. He 
shows how it is the tendency of the propertied 
classes to get control of the government and make 
the laws. This is so even in a democracy. The 



MEDITATIONS ON POLITICS 161 

protection of property then becomes the business 
of governments rather than the welfare of per- 
sons. 

"Ordinarily our parties are parties of circum- 
stances and not of principle, as the planting inter- 
est in conflict with the commercial, parties which 
are identical in their moral character, and which 
can easily change ground with each other in many 
of their measures." 

The conservative party may be composed of 
kind-hearted and excellent people, but it can never 
be trusted when property interests conflict with 
personal rights. "The conservative party, com- 
posed of the most moderate, able and cultivated 
part of the community, is timid and merely de- 
fensive of property. It vindicates no right, it 
aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it 
proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor 
cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish 
schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate 
the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, 
or the immigrant. ,, 



162 EMERSON 

We Americans boast of our political institu- 
tions. 

"But our institutions, though in coincidence 
with the spirit of the age, have not any exemption 
from the practical defects which have discredited 
other forms. Every actual state is corrupt. Good 
men must not obey the laws too well. What satire 
on government can equal the severity of censure 
conveyed in the word 'politic/ which for ages has 
signified cunning, intimating that the state is a 
trick. 

"We live in a very low state of the world and 
pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on 

force." 

i 

The essay ends with a glowing picture of a 
society of perfect freedom, in which reliance 
would be put on moral forces alone, and "the pri- 
vate citizen might be reasonable and a good neigh- 
bor without the hint of a jail or confiscation." 

As we come to this conclusion, we say with a 
start, "This mild-spoken gentleman has been 



MEDITATIONS ON POLITICS 163 

saying something which sounds very much like 
what the revolutionary radicals have been preach- 
ing with lamentable results. He has brought us 
to the edge of the precipice of philosophic an- 
archy." 

Perhaps so, but the mild-mannered gentleman 
is not an anarchist, and it has never entered his 
head to jump off the precipice. He has come to 
look at the view and he intends to return home by 
way of the turnpike. 

What Emerson has been saying is that political 
institutions are not ends in themselves, and that 
it is a superstition to regard them as such. They 
are expedients that are always capable of improve- 
ment. The resort to physical coercion would not 
be necessary in a perfect society. But in the 
meantime, what are we to do? Emerson's com- 
mon sense makes answer. 

"Let not the most conservative and timid fear 
anything from the premature surrender of the 
bayonet and the system of force. For according 
to the order of Nature, which is quite superior 



164 EMERSON 

to our will, it stands thus : there will always be a 
government of force where men are selfish; and 
when they are pure enough to abjure the code of 
force, they will be wise enough to see how the 
public ends of the post-office, of the highway, of 
commerce, and the exchange of property, of mu- 
seums, libraries, institutions of art and science 
can be answered/' 

Emerson would agree with the philosophical 
anarchist in saying that a society is possible in 
which men and women can regulate their affairs 
without the consciousness of any coercive govern- 
mental force. He would agree also that we ought 
to strive after such a free society. But when it 
came to the practical question as to how to attain 
this ideal, they would part company. The an- 
archist would say, "Let us abolish government, 
and then we shall have a community of individuals 
each one of whom will be a law unto himself/ 5 

Emerson would say, "I can not follow you. 
You put the cart before the horse. You have 



MEDITATIONS ON POLITICS 165 

fallen into the political superstition against which 
I have been protesting. You attribute to the 
absence of government power which the legalists 
attribute to governmental control. They think 
that law can make men virtuous; you think that 
the lack of it can perform the miracle. My at- 
titude is that of Paul in regard to the observance 
of the Jewish ceremonial law. 'Circumcision 
availeth nothing, and uncircumcision but the new 
creature.' " 

"Yes," the practical man would say, "that is all 
very well, but how are you going to get the new 
creature? If we had better men, wise, temperate, 
just, tolerant, we should not need so many laws ; 
but how are we to produce such personalities ?" 

At this point, the philosophy of the twentieth 
century would take issue with the liberalism of 
the nineteenth century. We have more faith in 
the power of institutions than had Emerson and 
his contemporaries. We are trying the experi- 
ment of free government under much more diffi- 
cult conditions. The study of the social sciences 



166 EMERSON 

has made us emphasize cooperation. May not 
society through wise laws and well-conceived 
institutions direct its own destinies? 

To which Emerson would answer: "Yes, if 
society is composed of enough wise and self- 
reliant individuals. But social progress depends 
on individual progress. A man must be able to 
stand alone before he is able to cooperate to any 
advantage." 

His faith in the destiny of America was 
founded on the belief that the people were better 
than their politics. There was a power there to 
be invoked in time of need. We are as yet only 
incompletely organized, but the power is there. 
Little by little there will be created institutions 
that will more adequately represent the aspirations 
of multitudes of private persons. 

"When I look at the constellations of cities 
which animate and illustrate the land, and see 
how little the government has to do with their 
daily life, how self -helped and self -directed all 
families are — knots of people in purely natural 



MEDITATIONS ON POLITICS 167 

societies — societies of trade, of kindred blood, 
of habitual hospitality, house and house, man act- 
ing on man by weight of opinion, of longer or 
better directed industry, the refining influence of 
women, the invitation which experience and per- 
manent causes open to youth and labors — when I 
see how much each virtuous and gifted person, 
whom all men consider, lives affectionately with 
scores of excellent people who are not known far 
from home, and perhaps with great reason reckons 
these people his superiors in virtue and in the 
symmetry and force of their qualities, I see what 
cubic values America has, and in these a better 
certificate of civilization than great cities or enor- 
mous wealth." 

In regard to the definite political issues of 
the time, Emerson's sympathies were clearly 
expressed. Slavery was always an abomination 
to him, but he was slow to identify himself w T ith 
the abolitionists. Their narrowness and intoler- 
ance offended his sense of fair play, while their 
courage attracted him. When the issue became 



168 EMERSON 

one of the right to free speech, he stood squarely 
with them. Against the extension of slavery he 
protested vigorously. When the Civil War came, 
Emerson threw himself heartily into the side of 
the Union. Toward Lincoln himself his attitude 
was one of doubt till the proclamation of emanci- 
pation came. After that there was no one who 
did more to interpret the soul of Lincoln to the 
people. 

But in one thing Emerson differed from most 
of the New England idealists. He did not put his 
trust in the respectable classes alone. He de- 
lighted in the crude strength of the people. His 
conception of American politics was that which 
Theodore Roosevelt so admirably illustrated in 
the generation following. It was the magnificent 
challenge to the reformer who was virile enough 
to meet all men on their own ground and over- 
come them there. 

"A timid man," Emerson says, "listening to 
the alarmist in Congress and in the newspapers 
and observing the profligacy of party — sectional 



MEDITATIONS ON POLITICS 169 

interests urged with a fury which shuts its eyes 
to consequences, with a mind made up to desperate 
extremities, ballot in one hand and rifle in the 
other, might easily believe that he and his country 
had seen their best days and harden himself the 
best he can against the coming ruin." 

But he believed that there were elements of 
strength which the timid man did not take into 
account. The rough and ready politician was 
likely to be more nearly right than the fastidious 
person who despairs of the republic. 

"Let these rough riders, — legislators in shirt- 
sleeves, — Hoosier, Sucker, Wolverine, Badger, — 
or whatever hard head Arkansas, Oregon, or 
Utah sends, half orator, half assassin, to represent 
its wrath and cupidity at Washington, — let these 
drive as they may; and the disposition of terri- 
tories and public lands, the necessity of balancing 
and keeping at bay the snarling majorities of 
German, Irish, and of native millions, will bestow 
promptness, address, and reason, at last, on our 



170 EMERSON 

buffalo-hunter, and authority and majesty of 
manners. The instinct of the people is right. Men 
expect from good Whigs put into offices by the 
respectability of the country, much less skill to 
deal with Mexico, Spain, Britain, or with our own 
malcontent members, than from some strong 
transgressor, like Jefferson, or Jackson, who first 
conquers his own government, and then uses the 
same genius to conquer the foreigner. The sen- 
ators who dissented from Mr. Polk's Mexican 
war were not those who knew better, but those 
who, from political position, could afford it; not 
Webster, but Benton and Calhoun. 

"These Hoosiers and Suckers are really better 
than the snivelling opposition. Their wrath is at 
least of a bold and manly cast. They see, against 
the unanimous declarations of the people, how 
much crime the people will bear; they proceed 
from step to step, and they have calculated but 
too justly upon their Excellencies, the New Eng- 
land governors, and upon their Honours, the New 
England legislators. The messages of the govern- 
ors and the resolutions of the legislatures are a 



MEDITATIONS ON POLITICS 171 

proverb for expressing a sham virtuous indig- 
nation, which, in the course of events, is sure to 
be belied." 

Wisdom is justified of her children and Emer- 
son's political teachings bore fruit in a man of 
the next generation, — Theodore Roosevelt. 
Roosevelt's "strenuous life" was a popular ex- 
position of the Emersonian doctrine. The strong 
man is needed in a democracy. He must under- 
stand the snarling majorities and the obstinate 
minorities. He must enjoy the conflict. He must 
play the game. But he must at the same time 
have a moral ideal of his own, simple and com- 
manding. He must be not a statuesque statesman 
but a rough and ready idealist. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE CANDID FRIEND OF ENGLAND 

"A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the 
best of actual nations, and an American has more 
reasons than another to visit Britain." 

WHEN in 1833 Emerson first visited Eng- 
land, his chief interest was in a few great 
men whose writings had inspired him with a desire 
to see their faces. He met Coleridge, Wordsworth, 
Landor and Carlyle; but he had few opportuni- 
ties to become acquainted with the English people. 
In 1847 he was invited to give a course of lec- 
tures before various Mechanics' Institutes in 
different parts of England. This visit gave him 
an opportunity to compare the Englishman at 
home with his own countrymen. The results of 
his observations w T ere embodied in a volume en- 
titled "English Traits." This book differs from 
the other works of Emerson in that it follows a 

172 



CANDID FRIEND OF ENGLAND 173 

distinct method. The writer gives us a picture 
of England and the English as he saw them in the 
middle years of the nineteenth century. The book 
gives the impressions of a philosophic traveler 
who was anxious to get beneath the surface and 
get at the secrets of power. He treats of wealth, 
race, literature, journalism, aristocracies, religion, 
education. 

Emerson differs from his contemporary Ameri- 
cans in treating England not as "the mother 
country/' but as a foreign country. The result 
of this is a detachment of mind which enables him 
to give judgments which are free from prejudice. 
The thing which impressed Emerson the most 
was the robustness of the people. There was a 
rude vigor which had not been impaired by cen- 
turies of civilization. The Englishman seemed a 
better animal than the American. In common 
sense, in practical sagacity, in the adoption of 
means to ends the English manifested themselves 
to be a masterful race. 

"Their self-respect, their faith in causation, 



174 - EMERSON 

and their realistic logic or coupling of means 
to ends have given them the leadership of the 
modern world. Montesquieu said, 'No people 
have true common sense but those who were born 
in England/ This common sense is a perception 
of all the conditions of our earthly existence, of 
laws that can be stated, and of laws that cannot 
be stated, or that are learned only by practice, in 
which allowance for friction is made. They are 
impious in their skepticism of theory, and in 
high departments they are cramped and sterile. 
But the unconditional surrender to facts, and the 
choice of means to reach their ends, are as admir- 
able as with ants and bees. 

"The bias of the nation is a passion for utility. 
They love the lever, the screw and pulley, the 
Flanders draught-horse, the waterfall, wind- 
mills, tide mills, the sea and the wind to bear 
their freight-ships. More than the diamond Koh- 
i-noor, which glitters among their crown- jewels, 
they prize that dull pebble which is wiser than a 
man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of 
the world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis 



CANDID FRIEND OF ENGLAND 175 

of the world. Now, their toys are steam and 
galvanism. They are heavy at the fine arts, but 
adroit at the coarse; not good in jewelry or 
mosaics, but the best iron-masters, colliers, wood- 
combers, and tanners in Europe. They apply 
themselves to agriculture, to draining, to resisting 
encroachment of sea, wind, travelling sands, cold 
and wet subsoil; to fishery, to manufacture of 
indispensable staples, — salt, plumbago^ leather, 
wool, glass, pottery and brick, — to bees and silk- 
worms; and by their steady combinations they 
succeed. A manufacturer sits down to dinner 
in a suit of clothes which was wool on a sheep's 
back at sunrise. You dine with a gentleman on 
venison, pheasant, quail, pigeons, poultry, mush- 
rooms and pineapples, all the growth of his estate. 
They are neat husbands for ordering all their 
tools pertaining to house and field. All are well 
kept. There is no want and no waste. They 
study use and fitness in their building, in the order 
of their dwellings and in their dress. The French- 
man invented the ruffle, the Englishman added the 
shirt. The Englishman wears a sensible coat 



176 EMERSOK 

buttoned to the chin, of rough but solid and lasting 
texture. If he is a lord he dresses a little worse 
than a commoner. They have diffused the taste 
for plain substantial hats, shoes and coats through 
Europe. They think him the best dressed man, 
whose dress is so fit for his use that you cannot 
notice or remember to describe it." 

There is a delightful chapter on English man- 
ners. 

"The Englishman is very petulant and precise 
about his accommodation at inns and on the 
roads ; a quiddle about his toast and his chop, and 
every species of convenience, and loud and pun- 
gent in his expressions of impatience at any neg- 
lect. His vivacity betrays itself at all points, in 
his manners, in his respiration and the inarticulate 
noises he makes in clearing the throat, — all sig- 
nificant of burly strength. He has stamina; he can 
take the initiative in emergencies. He has that 
aplomb which results from a good adjustment 
of the moral and physical nature and the obedi- 



CANDID FRIEND OF ENGLAND 177 

ence of all the powers to the will; as if the axes 
of his eyes were united to his backbone and only 
moved with the trunk. 

"This vigour appears in the incuriosity and 
stony neglect, each of every other. Each man 
walks, eats, drinks, shaves, dresses, gesticulates, 
and, in every manner, acts and suffers without 
reference to the bystanders, in his own fashion, 
only careful not to interfere with them or annoy 
them; not that he is trained to neglect the eyes 
of his neighbours, — he is really occupied with 
his own affair, and does not think of them. Every 
man in this polished country consults only his 
convenience, as much as a solitary pioneer in 
Wisconsin. I know not where any personal ec- 
centricity is so freely allowed, and no man gives 
himself any concern with it. An Englishman 
w r alks in a pouring rain, swinging his closed um- 
brella like a walking stick; wears a wig, or a 
shawl, or a saddle, or stands on his head, and no 
remark is made. And as he has been doing this 
for several generations it is now in the blood. 

"In short, every one of these islanders is an 



178 EMERSON 

island himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable. 
In a company of strangers you would think him 
deaf; his eyes never wander from his table and 
newspaper. He is never betrayed into any curi- 
osity or unbecoming emotion. They have all been 
trained in one severe school of manners, and 
never put off the harness. He does not give his 
hand. He does not let you meet his eye. It is 
almost an affront to look a man in the face with- 
out being introduced. In mixed or in select com- 
panies they do not introduce persons; so that a 

presentation is a circumstance as valid as a con- 

■ ■ - - - - . - y 

tract. Introductions are sacraments. He with- 
holds his name. At the hotel he is hardly willing 
to whisper it to the clerk at the book-office. If 
he gives you his private address on a card, it is 
like an avowal of friendship; and his bearing on 
being introduced is cold, even though he is seek- 
ing your acquaintance and is studying how he 
shall serve you." 

In regard to America the Englishman was in 
those days apt to be condescending. 



CANDID FRIEND OF ENGLAND 179 

"The English dislike the American structure of 
society, whilst yet trade, mills, public education 
and chartism are doing what they can to create 
in England the same social condition. America 
is the paradise of the economists ; is the favourable 
exception invariably quoted to the rules of ruin; 
but when he speaks directly of the Americans, 
the islander forgets his philosophy and remembers 
his disparaging anecdotes." 

Emerson's criticism of the England w T hich he 
saw is of interest to-day because most English- 
men would agree with it. It is a penetrating study 
of a period that has now passed away. From the 
consideration of defects he turns to the wealth 
and plenitude of the English nature, and the es- 
sential soundness of character. 

"I feel in regard to this aged England with the 
possessions, honours and trophies, and also with 
the infirmities of a thousand years gathering 
around her, inevitably committed to many old 
customs which cannot be suddenly changed; 



180 EMERSON 

pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new 
and all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts and com- 
peting populations, — I see her not dispirited, not 
weak but well remembering that she has seen dark 
days before; indeed with a kind of instinct that 
she sees rather better in a cloudy day, and that in 
the storm of battle and calamity she has a secret 
vigor and a pulse like a cannon. I see her in her 
old age not decrepit but young and still daring to 
believe in her power of endurance and expansion." 



CHAPTER XVII 



AMONG HIS BOOKS 



"I put the duty of being read invariably on the 
author. If he is not read, whose fault is it?" 

—Emerson's Journal, 1854. 



E 



JVING as he did in the midst of the New Eng- 



land colleges, one may wonder why Emer- 
son did not find a place in some chair of literature. 
Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes were professors. 
Why was not Emerson sought for as a teacher of 
youth? 

The question occurred to him more than once, 
but he answers it in a characteristic fashion. The 
reason why he was not asked, he says, was because 
those in authority thought he was not fitted for 
such a position, and he had a suspicion that they 
were right. 

I am ready to concur in this judgment. Pro- 
fessor Emerson, I am sure, would have been 

181 



182 EMERSON 

embarrassed by a row of students conscientiously 
taking notes and giving docile assent to his 
challenging sentences with a keen eye to the marks 
that were to be the reward of their attention. 

Emerson's attempts to be didactic were uni- 
formly unfortunate. He could not command his 
moods for any systematic exposition. He con- 
fesses that the ways of the academic scholar were 
always an astonishment to him. His thoughts, 
would not "stay put." In the course of a year 
he managed to get through with a respectable 
amount of work, but it came occasionally. When 
he knew that he ought to write a lecture, it quick- 
ened his wits to write a poem for the Dial, and 
when the editor of the Dial demanded a poem, 
it stirred his mind to a new effort at prose com- 
position. Having found that this method an- 
swered best for his own constitution, he became 
reconciled to it, but it could not be recommended 
by a professor to his students. Neither could his 
favorite method of reading, beginning at the end 
of the book and reading backward, with wide 
intervals between the acts, be recommended, al- 



AMONG HIS BOOKS 183 

though it has its advantages as a method of test- 
ing. If there is a suspicion that the apples in a 
basket have been "deaconed/' the skeptical buyer 
will reverse the order in which they appear. The 
fruit looks different bottom side up. 

But the chief disability of Emerson as a formal 
teacher of literature takes us back to the consider- 
ation to which attention was drawn in the first 
chapter. His mind has its real affinity to the 
thinkers of antiquity, to whom books were not an 
object of special interest. The proper study of 
mankind was man and nature. The book was only 
the record of some fellow-student, useful as stim- 
ulating his own thought. 

"It seems meritorious to read ; but from every 
thing but history or the works of the old com- 
manding authors I come back with the conviction 
that the slightest wood thought, the least signifi- 
cant native emotion of my own, is more to me. M 

Bibliolatry, in the wide sense of book worship, 
had no more uncompromising enemy. "We are 



184 EMERSON 

too civil to books. For a few golden sentences 
we will turn over and actually read a volume of 
four or five hundred pages." 

One can imagine Emerson's intonation as he 
expressed his wonder that we would actually read 
four or five hundred pages for the sake of a 
golden sentence which might be concealed in 
them. The great art of the reader was to pass 
quickly over the desert place in order to linger 
long in the green oasis. 

"The colleges, whilst they provide us with li- 
braries, furnish no professor of books; and, I 
think, no chair is so much wanted. In a library 
we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear 
friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter 
in these paper and leathern boxes; and, though 
they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or 
twenty centuries for us, — some of them, — and 
are eager to give us a sign, and unbosom them- 
selves, it is the law of their limbo that they must 
not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter 
has dressed them, like battalions of infantry, in 



AMONG HIS BOOKS 185 

coat and jacket o£ one cut, by the thousand and 
ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right 
one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of 
Permutation and Combination, — not a choice out 
of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets 
all alike. But it happens in our experience, that 
in this lottery there are at least fifty or a hundred 
blanks to a prize. It seems, then, as if some char- 
itable soul, after losing a great deal of time among 
the false books, and alighting upon a few true 
ones which made him happy and wise, would do 
a right act in naming those which have been 
bridges or ships to carry him safely over dark 
morasses and barren oceans, into the heart of 
sacred cities, into palaces and temples. This 
would be best done by those great masters of 
books who from time to time appear, — the Fab- 
ricii, the Seldens, Magliabechis, Scaligers, Miran- 
dolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose eyes sweep the 
whole horizon of learning. But private readers, 
reading purely for love of the book, would serve 
us by leaving each the shortest note of what he 
found. 



186 EMERSON 

"There are books ; and it is practicable to read 
them, because they are so few. We look over 
with a sigh the monumental libraries of Paris, of 
the Vatican and the British Museum. In 1858 
the number of printed books in the Imperial 
Library at Paris was estimated at eight hundred 
thousand volumes, with an annual increase of 
twelve thousand volumes ; so that the number of 
printed books extant to-day may easily exceed a 
million. It is easy to count the number of pages 
which a diligent man can read in a day, and the 
number of years which human life in favourable 
circumstances allows to reading; and to demon- 
strate that, though he should read from dawn till 
dark, for sixty years, he must die in the first 
alcoves. But nothing can be more deceptive than 
this arithmetic, where none but a natural method 
is really pertinent. I visit occasionally the Cam- 
bridge Library, and I can seldom go there with- 
out renewing the conviction that the best of it all 
is already within the four walls of my study at 
home. The inspection of the catalogue brings me 
continually back to the few standard writers who 



AMONG HIS BOOKS 187 

are on every private shelf; and to these it can 
afford only the most slight and casual additions. 
The crowds and centuries of books are only com- 
mentary and elucidation, echoes and weakeners 
of these few great voices of Time." 

for the mere book worm he had little respect. 

"And yet — and yet — I hesitate to denounce 
reading as aught inferior and mean. When vi- 
sions of my books come over me, as I sit writing, 
when the remembrance of some poet comes, I 
accept it with pure joy, and quit my thinking as 
sad, lumbering work, and hasten to my little 
heaven." 

There were not many authors who were ad- 
mitted to his little heaven. They were so con- 
genial to his own mind that there was no question 
of mine and thine. It did not matter what the 
subject was so that it was treated in a suggestive 
way. The great purpose of literature is to stimu- 
late the faculty of thinking. 



188 EMERSON 

"You say, 'Your reading is irrelevant/ Yes, 
for you, not for me. It makes no difference what 
I read. If it is irrelevant, I read it deeper. I 
read it till it is pertinent to Nature and the hour 
that now passes. A good scholar will find Aris- 
tophanes and Hafiz and Rabelais full of American 
history." 

His ambition for his own books was that they 
might be treated in the same fashion. "I would 
have my books read as I read my favorite books, 
not with explosion and astonishment, a marvel 
and a rocket, but as a friendly and agreeable in- 
fluence." 

In his incursions into Book-land he followed 
the same method, or lack of method. He read 
what pleased him. The best guide to such books 
he thought was common fame. Certain books had 
pleased generations of readers. This proved that 
they were readable. 

"The best rule of reading will be a method 
fnom nature, and not a mechanical one of hours 



AMONG HIS BOOKS 189 

and pages. It holds each student to a pursuit of 
his native aim, instead of a desultory miscellany. 
Let him read what is proper to him, and not waste 
his memory on a crowd of mediocrities. As 
whole nations have derived their culture from a 
single book, — as the Bible has been the literature 
as well as the religion of large portions of Europe, 
- — as Hafiz was the eminent genius of the Persians, 
Confucius of the Chinese, Cervantes of the 
Spaniards; so, perhaps, the human mind would 
be a gainer if all the secondary writers were lost, 
— say, in England, all but Shakespeare, Milton 
and Bacon, — through the pro founder study so 
drawn to those wonderful minds. With this pilot 
of his own genius, let the student read one, or 
let him read many, he will read advantageously. 
Doctor Johnson said : 'Whilst you stand deliber- 
ating which book your son shall read first, another 
boy has read both ; read anything five hours a day 
and you will soon be learned/ 

"Nature is much our friend in this matter. 
Nature is always clarifying her water and her 
wine. No filtration can be so perfect. She does 



190 EMERSON 

the same thing by books as by Her gases and 
plants. There is always a selection in writers, 
and then a selection from the selection. All books 
that get fairly into the vital air of the world were 
written by the successful class, by the affirming 
and advancing class, who utter what tens of 
thousands feel though they cannot say." 

Emerson's advice is that we should read famous 
books, but that we should not approach them as 
"classics," but with the same familiarity with 
which we read the daily newspaper. Plato's 
Socrates was not a dignified literary person. |We 
can know him just as we know a shrewd Yankee 
farmer. He may be to the reader a character 
whose oddity delights us. 

"He was plain as a Quaker in habit and speech, 
affected low phrases and illustrations from cocks 
and quails, soup-pans, and sycamore-spoons, 
grooms and farriers, and unnamable offices, — 
especially if he talked with any superfine person. 
He had a Franklin-like wisdom. Thus, he showed 



AMONG HIS BOOKS 191 

one who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia, 
that it was no more than his daily walk within 
doors, if continuously extended would easily 
reach. 

"Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears, 
— an immense talker, — the rumour ran, that on 
one or two occasions, in the war with Bceotia, he 
had shown a determination which had covered the 
retreat of a troupe; and there was some story that, 
under cover of folly, he had, in the city govern- 
ment, when one day he chanced to hold a seat 
there, evinced a courage in opposing singly the 
popular voice, which had well-nigh ruined him. 
He is very poor, but then he is hardy as a soldier, 
and can live on a few olives; usually, in the 
strictest sense, on bread and water, except when 
entertained by his friends. His necessary ex- 
penses were exceedingly small, and no one else 
could live as he did. He wore no under garment; 
his upper garment was the same for summer and 
winter; and he went barefooted; and it is said 
that, to procure the pleasure, which he loves, of 
talking at his ease all day with the most elegant 



192 EMERSON 

and cultivated young men, he will now and then 
return to his shop and carve statues, good or bad, 
for sale. However that be, it is certain that he 
had grown to delight in nothing else than this 
conversation ; and that, under his hypocritical pre- 
tense of knowing nothing, he attacks and brings 
down all the fine speakers, all the fine philosophers 
of Athens, whether natives, or strangers from 
Asia Minor and the islands. Nobody can refuse 
to talk with him, he is so honest, and really curi- 
ous to know ; a man who was willingly confuted 
if he did not speak the truth, and who willingly 
confuted others asserting what was false; and 
not less pleased when confuted than when con- 
futing; for he thought not any evil happened to 
men of such magnitude as false opinion respecting 
the just and unjust. A pitiless disputant, who 
knows nothing, but the bounds of whose conquer- 
ing intelligence no man had ever reached ; whose 
temper was imperturbable; whose dreadful logic 
was always leisurely and sportive ; so careless and 
ignorant as to disarm the wariest and draw them 



AMONG HIS BOOKS 193 

in the pleasantest manner into horrible doubts 
and confusion. But he always knew the way out; 
knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape; he 
drives them to terrible choices by his dilemmas, 
and tosses the Hippiases and Gorgiases, with 
their grand reputations, as a boy tosses his balls. 
The tyrannous realist! — Meno has discoursed a 
thousand times at length on virtue before many 
companies and very well, as it appeared to him; 
but, at this moment, he cannot even tell what it 
is, — this cramp-fish of a Socrates has so bewitched 
him. 

'This hard-headed humourist, whose strange 
conceits, drollery and bonhommie diverted the 
young patricians, whilst the rumour of his say- 
ings and quibbles gets abroad every day, turns 
out, in the sequel, to have a probity as invincible 
as his logic, and to be either insane, or, at least, 
under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his re- 
ligion." 

In like manner Shakespeare is not to be thought 



194 EMERSON 

of in terms of mere literature. We forget the 
technicalities of his art. "He was a full man 
who liked to talk." 

"Some able and appreciating critics think no 
criticism on Shakespeare valuable that does not 
rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is 
falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think 
as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, 
but still think it secondary. He was a full man 
who liked to talk ; a brain exhaling thoughts and 
images, which, seeking vent, found the drama 
next at hand. Had he been less we should have 
had to consider how well he filled his place, how 
good a dramatist he was, — and he is the best in 
the world. But it turns out that what he has to 
say is of that weight as to withdraw some atten- 
tion from the vehicle; and he is like some saint 
whose history is to be rendered into all languages, 
into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and 
cut up into proverbs, so that the occasion which 
gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversa- 
tion, or of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is im- 



AMONG HIS BOOKS 195 

material compared with the universality of its 
application. So it fares with the wise Shakes- 
peare and his book of life. He wrote the airs for 
all our modern music ; he wrote the text of modern 
life; the text of manners; he drew the man of 
England and Europe; the father of the man in 
America; he drew the man, and described the 
day, and what is done in it; he read the hearts of 
men and women, their probity and their second 
thought and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and 
the transitions by which virtues and vices slide 
into their contraries ; he could divide the mother's 
part from the father's part in the face of the 
child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom 
and of fate; he knew the laws of repression 
which make the police of nature; and all the 
sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his 
mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies 
on the eye. And the importance of this wis- 
dom of life sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, 
out of notice. 'Tis like making a question con- 
cerning the paper on which a king's message is 
written. 



196 EMERSON 

"Shakespeare is as much out of the category 
of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd/' 

With this conception of literature Emerson did 
not accept the doctrine of those realists who think 
that the highest praise of a literary work is that 
it gives an exact transcript of actual life. We all 
are surrounded by actuality, we do not need to 
have some one reproduce for us what we have 
every day an opportunity to see for ourselves. 
What the man of genius does is to allow us to 
become acquainted with the working of his own 
mind. And the reader must make sure that it is 
the kind of mind that is worth knowing. 



CHAPTER XVIII 



emerson's historic sense 



"I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel 
the eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The 
Greek had, it seems, the same fellow beings as I. 
The sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart 
precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted dis- 
tinction between Greek and English, between Classic 
and Romantic schools become superficial and pe- 
dantic. When a thought of Plato becomes a thought 
to me, when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar 
fires me, time is no more. 33 

A CRITIC has declared that Emerson was 
7\ lacking in the "historic sense." By this he 
means that Emerson had no aptitude for histori- 
cal investigation as it has been developed by 
modern scholars. He could never have been an 
historian like Lord Acton, seeking to get at 
the exact truth in regard to all the events of past 
periods of time. He was incapable of the fierce 
industry with which Thomas Carlyle investigated 

197 



198 EMERSON 

the records of long dead Hohenzollerns. One 
Hohenzollern would have been enough for Emer- 
son. He had no taste for antiquarian research. 

But to say that a man is without the historic 
sense is like accusing him of a lack of the sense 
of humor. This latter accusation usually means 

little more than there is a difference in the taste 
i 

for jokes. 

Instead of saying that Emerson lacked the his- 
toric sense, it would be better to inquire as to that 
which was characteristic in his attitude to history. 
Only when we sympathize with that can we obtain 
any benefit from him. 

There are two ways of looking at human his- 
tory. One may fix his mind on the differences 
between one period and another, or he may be 
more profoundly interested in the identities which 
he recognizes. 

In the former case, what is seen is a succession 
of events and personages each having its little 
day and passing away forever. Each is different 
from the other, and it is the business of the his- 
torian to note those differences. He is the stage 



EMERSON'S HISTORIC SENSE 199 

manager careful about the entrances and the exits 
of the actors, and about the way the lights are 
arranged for each scene. There are distinctly 
marked periods of time, each with its beginning, 
middle and end. This is one way of looking at 
history. 

Another way is that of the philosopher who is 
interested primarily not in persons or events, but 
in the forces of which they are the temporary 
manifestations. He perceives not so much the 
differences as the identities. This was Emerson's 
habitual point of view. He did not care for the 
dead past. So much of it as was really dead he 
would decently bury. But that part of it which 
was alive he would incorporate into the living 
present and treat as of contemporary interest. It 
was here that Emerson's historic sense mani- 
fested itself. 

In the volume called "Representative Men" 
Emerson illustrates his conception of History. 
"The search after the great men," he says, "is the 
dream of youth, and the most serious occupation 
of manhood." And yet when we have found the 



200 EMERSON 

great man, we find a person very much like our- 
selves. We agree with him, which means that he 
expresses thoughts that are very like our own. 
We are conscious of the fact that he reveals what 
is in us as well as in him. Plato, Shakespeare, 
Montaigne, Napoleon, were representative men. 
There were millions of persons who had the same 
qualities, but in less degree. The fact that they 
have been appreciated proves their kinship to the 
multitude. 

"The genius of humanity is the right point of 
view in history. The qualities abide; the men 
who exhibit them have no more nor less, and pass 
away; the qualities remain in another brow. No 
experience is more familiar. Once you saw 
phoenixes, now they are gone; the world is not 
therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which 
you read sacred emblems turn out to be common 
pottery; but the sense of the picture is sacred, 
and you may still read them, transferred to the 
walls of the world. For a time our teachers 
serve us personally, as meters or milestones of 



EMERSON'S HISTORIC SENSE 201 

progress. Once they were angels of knowledge 
and their figures touched the sky. Then we drew 
near, saw their means, culture and limits and they 
yielded their place to other geniuses. Happy if a 
few names remain so high that we have not been 
able to read them nearer, and age and compari- 
son have not robbed them of a ray. But at last we 
shall cease to look in men for completeness and 
shall content ourselves with their social and dele- 
gated quality. All that respects the individual 
is temporary and prospective like the individual 
himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a 
catholic existence. We have never come at the 
true and best benefit of any genius so long as we 
believe him an original force." 

Here Emerson differed radically from his 
friend Carlyle. To Carlyle the hero was an orig- 
inal force; Luther was more than the Reforma- 
tion of the sixteenth century. Cromwell and 
Frederick the Great were treated as if they were 
creatures who were unlike the Englishmen and 
the Prussians whom they governed. To Emerson 



202 EMERSON 

they were men who best represented the ideals of 
their countrymen. 

To my mind Emerson's most brilliant bit of 
historical criticism is contained in his Essay on 
Napoleon. Many have been the descriptions of 
the life and character of the great Corsican ad- 
venturer. Emerson makes us see the kind of man 
Napoleon was. "Bonaparte was the idol of com- 
mon men because he had in transcendent degree 
the qualities and powers of common men." 

He was "a man of stone and iron, capable of 
sitting on horseback sixteen or seventeen hours, 
of going many days together without rest or 
food, except by snatches, and with the speed and 
spring of a tiger in action; a man not embar- 
rassed by any scruples; compact, instant, selfish, 
prudent, and of a perception which did not suffer 
itself to be balked or misled by any pretences of 
others, or any superstition or any heat or haste 
of his own. 

"I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the 
middle classes of modern society; of the throng 



EMERSON'S HISTORIC SENSE 203 

who filled the markets, shops, counting houses, 
manufactories, ships of the modern world, aiming 
to be rich. He was the agitator, the destroyer of 
prescription, the internal improver, the liberal, 
the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of 
doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly 
and abuse. ,, 

Napoleon's change from the young revolution- 
ist to the Emperor was nothing strange. "The 
democrat is the young conservative. The aristo- 
crat is the democrat, ripe and gone to seed — be- 
cause both parties stand on the one ground of the 
supreme value of property, which one endeavors 
to get and the other to keep. Bonaparte may be 
said to represent the whole history of this party, 
its youth and its age, yes and with poetic justice 
its fate in his own." 

Turn from the Essay on Napoleon to that on 
Power. In the description of the village tavern 
keeper you will recognize a poor relation of the 
great Napoleon. There is the same combination 
of force and unscrupulousness. 



204 EMERSON 

"I knew a burly Bonaface who for many years 
kept a public house in one of our rural capitals. 
He was a knave whom the town could ill spare. 
He was a social vascular creature, grasping and 
selfish. There is no crime which he did not or 
could not commit. But he made good friends of 
the selectmen, served them with his best chop 
when they supped at his house, and also with his 
honor the Judge he was very cordial, grasping 
his hand. He introduced all the fiends, male and 
female, into the town, and united in his person 
the functions of bully, incendiary, swindler, bar- 
keeper and burglar. He girdled the trees, and 
cut off the horses' tails of the temperance people 
in the night. He led the 'rummies' and radicals 
in the town meeting. Meanwhile, he was civil, 
fat and easy in his house, and precisely the most 
public-spirited citizen. He was active in getting 
the roads repaired and planted with shade trees; 
he subscribed for the fountains, the gas and the 
telegraph, he introduced the new horse rake, the 
new scraper, the baby- jumper and what not that 
Connecticut sends to the admiring citizens." 



EMERSON'S HISTORIC SENSE 205 

Schoolboys dispute the question — Was the 
career of Napoleon Bonaparte beneficial to 
Europe? The same question arises in regard to 
the public-spirited and disreputable tavern keeper. 
Emerson as an historian would not attempt to 
give a final verdict. He would insist on having 
the facts on both sides presented. And then he 
would judge the value of the facts by their cor- 
respondence with his own experience. 

"The fact narrated must correspond to some- 
thing in me to be credible or intelligible. We as 
we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, 
priest and king, martyr and executioner, must 
fasten the image to some reality in our secret ex- 
perience, or we shall learn nothing rightly." 

One experiences history as he experiences re- 
ligion. There are a few passions that are com- 
mon to all men. They are the keys to all story 
of the past. It is mere pedantry to explain the 
worship and the achievements of other ages as 
if they were mysteries. After all they are nothing 
strange. We have felt the same impulses. 



206 EMERSON 

"How easily these old worships of Moses, of 
Zoroaster, of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate 
themselves in the mind. I cannot find any an- 
tiquity in them. They are mine as much as theirs. 

"I have seen the first monks and anchorets 
without crossing seas or centuries. More than 
once some individual has appeared to me with 
such negligence of labour and such commanding 
contemplation, a haughty beneficiary, begging in 
the name of God, as made good to the nineteenth 
century Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the 
first Capuchins. 

"The priestcraft of the East and West, of the 
Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded 
in the individual's private life. The cramping 
influence of a hard formalist on a young child in 
repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the 
understanding, and that without producing indig- 
nation, but only fear and obedience, and even 
much sympathy with tyranny, — is a familiar fact 
explained to the child when he becomes a man, 
only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is 
himself a child tyrannized over by those names 



EMERSON'S HISTORIC SENSE 207 

and words and forms, of whose influence he was 
merely the organ to the youth. The fact teaches 
him how Belus was worshipped, and how the 
Pyramids were built, better than the discovery 
by Champollion of the names of all the workmen 
and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and 
the Mounds of Cholula at his door, and himself 
has laid the courses. 

"Again, in that protest which each considerate 
person makes against the superstition of his times, 
he repeats step for step the part of old reformers, 
and in the search after truth finds like them new 
perils to virtue. He learns again what moral 
vigour is needed to supply the girdle of a super- 
stition. A great licentiousness treads on the heels 
of a reformation. How many times in the history 
of the world has the Luther of the day had to 
lament the decay of piety in his own household ! 
'Doctor/ said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, 
'how is it that, whilst subject to papacy, we prayed 
so often and with such fervour, whilst now we 
pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?/ 

"The advancing man discovers how deep a 



208 EMERSON 

property he has in literature, — in all fable as well 
as in all history. He finds that the poet was no 
odd fellow who described strange and impossible 
situations, but that universal man wrote by his 
pen a confession true for one and true for all. 
His own secret biography he finds in lines wonder- 
fully intelligible to him, dotted down before he 
was born. One after another he comes up in his 
private adventures with every fable of -^Esop, of 
Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of 
Scott, and verifies them with his own head and 
hands." 



CHAPTER XIX 



PEACE AND WAR 



"I do not like to speak to the Peace Society, if so 
I am to restrain myself in so extreme a privilege as 
the use of sword and bullet. For the peace of a man 
who has forsworn the use of the bullet seems to me 
not peace, but a canting impotence; but with knife 
and bullet in my hands, if I from greater bravery 
and honor cast them aside, then I know the glory of 
peace." 

IN 1838 Emerson delivered a lecture on War 
which has furnished many excellent texts for 
thoroughgoing pacifists. And yet in the war for 
the preservation of the Union, he threw himself 
unreservedly into the conflict. At first sight, it 
might seem that under the stress of circumstances 
he had given up his earlier convictions. 

Yet the words which I have placed at the head 
of this chapter were written at the time he was 
making his plea for universal peace. Emerson's 
position was practically unchanged by the events 

209 



210 EMERSON 

r 

of his time. He was a believer in peace, but it 
was the peace of the strong man armed. It was 
peace established and maintained by men who 
were not to be coerced. Having demonstrated 
that they were able to take care of themselves 
they could lay aside their arms and trust to moral 
force. His lecture was in praise of the glory of 
peace which he believed in the end would super- 
sede the meretricious glories of war. 

"War educates the senses, calls into action the 
will, perfects the physical constitution, brings 
men into such swift and close collision at critical 
moments that man measures man. On its own 
scale, on the virtues it lives, it endures no counter- 
feit, but shakes the whole society until every atom 
falls into the place its specific gravity assigns it. 
What does war, beginning from the lowest races 
and reaching up to man, signify? Is it not mani- 
fest that it covers a great and beneficent principle 
which nature has deeply at heart ? What is that 
principle? It is self help. Nature implants with 
life the instinct of self help, perpetual struggle 



PEACE AND WAR 211 

to be, to resist opposition, to attain to freedom 
and the security of a permanent, self -de fended 
being, and to each creature these objects are made 
so dear that it risks its life continually in the 
struggles for these ends." 

But because war has had such uses in the past, 
does it follow that it must continue indefinitely ? 

"At a certain stage of his progress a man fights 
if he be of sound mind and body. At a higher 
stage he makes no offensive demonstration, but 
he is alert to repel injury and of an unconquerable 
heart. At a still higher he comes into the region 
of holiness, passion has passed from him, his war- 
like nature is all converted into an active medicinal 
principle, he sacrifices himself, and accepts with 
alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity; 
but being attacked he bears it and turns the other 
cheek, as one engaged throughout his being, no 
longer to the service of the individual but to the 
common soul of man." 

There are passages in praise of non-resistance 
Syhich sound very much like the words of doc- 



212 EMERSON 

trinaire pacifists. But it is the non-resistance of 
the soldier who with arms in his hand will not 
use them to revenge a private wrong. 

"The cause of peace is not the cause of 
cowardice. If peace is sought to be defended 
or preserved for the safety of the luxurious and 
the timid, it is a shame and the peace will be base. 
War is better and the peace will be broken. If 
peace is to be maintained, it must be by brave men 
who have come up to the same height of the hero, 
namely the will to carry their life in their hands, 
and have gone a step beyond the hero and will not 
seek another man's life — men who by their intel- 
lectual insight or else by their moral education at- 
tained such perception of their own intrinsic 
worth that they do not think property or their 
own body a sufficient good to be saved by sucli 
dereliction of principle as treating a man like a 
sheep." 

War is barbarous, peace has possibilities of 
heroic achievement, but are these not circum- 



PEACE AND WAR 213 

stances under which the good man must fight? 
In 1838 Emerson answered, "A wise man will 
never impawn his future being and action, and 
decide before-hand what he shall do in a given 
extreme event. Nature and God will instruct 
him what to do." 

When the extreme event came he had no hesi- 
tancy. In 1862 he wrote, "It is wonderful to see 
the unseasonable senility of the Peace Party 
through all its masks, blinding their eyes to the 
main feature of the war, namely its inevitable- 
ness." 

Heroism is after all the same whether in peace 
or in war. It is the deliberate choice of the 
highest service possible under the circumstances. 
He thinks of the soldier who when war is in- 
evitable obeys the call of duty as one who is 
sacrificed to make peace possible. 

"But best befriended of the God 
He who, in evil times, 
Warned by an inward voice, 
Heeds not the darkness and the dread, 
Biding by his rule and choice, 
Feeling only the fiery thread 



214 EMERSON 

Leading over heroic ground, 
Walled with mortal terror round, 
To the aim which him allures, 
And the sweet heaven his deed secures. 
Peril around, all else appalling, 
Cannon in front and leaden rain, 
Him duty through the clarion calling 
To the van called not in vain. 



"Stainless soldier on the walls, 
Knowing this, — and knows no more, — 
Whoso fights, and whoso falls, 
'Justice triumphs ever more." 



CHAPTER XX 

THE FORTUNES OF THE POOR 

"The whole interest of history lies in the fortunes 
of the poor'' 

TO the present-day reader Emerson is least 
satisfactory when he touches upon what 
we call the problem of poverty. We have in 
mind the condition of thousands of persons who 
through no fault of their own are condemned to 
live in city slums. They are, we believe, victims 
of social misadjustment. They can be redeemed 
only by social effort. 

When we hear Emerson saying that the whole 
interest of history lies in the fortunes of the poor, 
we expect to hear him say something bearing 
upon our problem. How does he propose to 
abolish poverty? We are disappointed. Pov- 
erty, he tells us, is not so bad after all. Indeed 
it has many advantages. Sometimes he rises into 

215 



216 EMERSON 

a strain that reminds us of Saint Francis of 
Assisi. 

We can only understand Emerson and Saint 
Francis when we define the terms they used. 
^When Francis sang the praises of my lady Pov- 
erty he was not thinking of the condition of those 
who lived in the hideous slums of great cities. 
He had in mind the poverty of the Italian peas- 
ants whose fortunes he was glad to share. They 
were poor in this world's goods, but rich in spir- 
itual resources. They lived in the open air, they 
listened to the song of birds, and they were happy 
in human companionship. 

The poverty which Emerson praised was the 
poverty of the well-born New England youth. 
It was a life without luxury, but with endless 
opportunity. There was a stimulating of neces- 
sity acting upon natural ambition. The poor 
man's son could aspire to any station in society. 
The way was open to him. If he had health he 
was to be congratulated as one of the children of 
good fortune. This was a theme of which he 
never tired. 



FORTUNES OF THE POOR 217 



4 



"The poor man's son is educated. There is 
many a humble house in every city, in every 
town, where talent and taste, and sometimes 
genius, dwell with poverty and labour. Who has 
not seen, and who can see unmoved, under a low 
roof, the eager, blushing boys discharging as they 
can their household chores, and hastening into 
the sitting-room to the study of to-morrow's 
merciless lesson, yet stealing time to read one 
chapter more of the novel hardly smuggled into 
the tolerance of father and mother, — atoning for 
the same by some pages of Plutarch or Gold- 
smith; the warm sympathy with which they kin- 
dle each other in school-yard, or in barn or wood- 
shed, with scraps of poetry or song, with phrases 
of the last oration, or mimicry of the orator; the 
youthful criticism, on Sunday, of the sermons; 
the school declamation faithfully rehearsed at 
home, sometimes to the fatigue, sometimes to the 
admiration of sisters; the first solitary joys of 
literary vanity, when the translation or the theme 
has been completed, sitting alone near the top of 
the house; the cautious comparison of the attrac- 



218 EMERSON 

tive advertisement of the arrival of Macready, 
Booth, or Kemble, or of the discourse of a well- 
known speaker, with the expense of the enter- 
tainment; the affectionate delight with which 
they greet the return of each one after the early 
separations which school or business require ; the 
foresight with which, during such absences, they 
hive the honey which opportunity offers, for the 
ear and imagination of the others; and the unre- 
strained glee with which they disburden them- 
selves of their early mental treasures when the 
holidays bring them again together? What is 
the hoop that holds them staunch? It is the iron 
band of poverty, of necessity, of austerity, which, 
excluding them from the sensual enjoyments 
which make other boys too early old, has directed 
their activity in safe and right channels, and 
made them, despite themselves, reverers of the 
grand, the beautiful, and the good. Ah! short- 
sighted students of books, of Nature, and of 
man! too happy, could they know their advan- 
tages. They pine for freedom from that mild 
parental yoke; they sigh for fine clothes, for 



FORTUNES OF THE POOR 219 

rides, for the theater, and premature freedom and 
dissipation, which others possess. Woe to them, 
if their wishes were crowned! The angels that 
dwell with them, and are weaving laurels of life 
for their youthful brows, are Toil, and Want, 
and Truth, and Mutual Faith." 

In the last fifty years there have been vast 
social changes. Even in America we have begun 
to feel the pressure of population on the means of 
subsistence. The young man can not obtain a 
farm by the simple device of going West. And 
yet America is still a land of opportunity. It is 
still "a poor man's country" even though the poor 
man has to be more alert than formerly in order 
to win success. 

It is still true that inherited wealth is not nec- 
essary for the attainment of the most desirable 
things. One may be born poor and yet be a child 
of good fortune. 

"In America, the necessity of clearing the for- 
est, laying out town and street, and building 
every house and barn and fence, then church and 



220 EMERSON 

town-house, exhausted such means as the Pil- 
grims brought, and made the whole population 
poor; and the like necessity is still found in each 
new settlement in the Territories. These needs 
gave their character to the public debates in every 
village and state. I have been often impressed at 
our country town-meetings with the accumulated 
virility, in each village, of five or six or eight or 
ten men, who speak so well, and so easily handle 
the affairs of the town. I often hear the business 
of a little town (with which I am most familiar) 
discussed with a clearness and thoroughness, 
and with a generosity, too, that would have sat- 
isfied me had it been in one of the larger cap- 
itals. I am sure each one of my readers has a 
parallel experience. And every one knows that 
in every town or city is always to be found a cer- 
tain number of public-spirited men, who perform, 
unpaid, a great amount of hard work in the inter- 
est of the churches, of schools, of public grounds, 
works of taste and refinement. And as in civil 
duties, so in social power and duties. Our gentle- 
men of the old school, that is, of the school of 



FORTUNES OF THE POOR 221 

Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, were bred 
after English types, and that style of breeding 
furnished fine examples in the last generation; 
but, though some of us have seen such, I doubt 
they are all gone. But nature is not poorer to- 
day. With all our haste, and slipshod ways, and 
flippant self-assertion, I have seen examples of 
new grace and power in address that honour the 
country. It was my fortune not long ago, with 
my eyes directed on this subject, to fall in with 
an American to be proud of. I said never was 
such force, good meaning, good sense, good ac- 
tion, combined with such domestic lovely be- 
haviour, such modesty and persistent preference 
for others. Wherever he moved he was the bene- 
factor. It is of course that he should ride well, 
shoot well, sail well, keep house well, administer 
affairs well, but he was the best talker, also, in 
the company ; what with a perpetual practical wis- 
dom, with an eye always to the working of the 
thing, what with the multitude and distinction of 
his facts (and one detected continually that he 
had a hand in everything that has been done), 



222 EMERSON 

and in the temperance with which he parried all 
offence, and opened the eyes of the person he 
talked with without contradicting him. Yet I 
said to myself, How little this man suspects, with 
his sympathy for men and his respect for lettered 
and scientific people, that he is not likely, in any 
company, to meet a man superior to himself. And 
I think this is a good country, that can bear such 
a creature as he is." 



CHAPTER XXI 



THE CUTTING EDGE 



"It (courage) gives the cutting edge to every pro- 
fession" 

THE virtue which Emerson insisted upon 
as essential was courage. In the ruder 
contacts of life it is common enough, but it is 
needed equally in time of peace. 

"There is a courage of the cabinet as well as 
a courage of the field, a courage of manners in 
private assemblies that enables one man to speak 
masterly to a hostile company whilst another man 
who can easily face a cannon's mouth does not 
open his own. 

"There is the courage of the merchant in deal- 
ing with his trade, by which dangerous turns of 
affairs are met and prevailed over. Merchants 
recognize as much gallantry, well judged too, in 

223 



224 EMERSON 

the conduct of a wise and upright man of busi- 
ness in difficult times, as soldiers in a soldier. 

"There is a courage in the treatment of every 
art by a master in architecture, in sculpture, in 
painting and in poetry, cheering the mind of spec- 
tator or receiver as by true strokes of genius, 
which yet no wise implies the presence of phys- 
ical valor in the artist. This is the courage of 
genius in every kind. A certain quantity of 
power belongs to a certain quantity of faculty. 
The beautiful voice in church goes sounding on, 
and covers up in its volume, as in a cloak, all the 
defects in the choir. The singers I observe all 
yield to it, and so the fair singer indulges her in- 
stinct, and dares and dares because she knows she 



can!' 



There could not be a more perfect illustration 
of the kind of courage which Emerson admired 
than the voice of the singer directed by a sure 
sense of power. It does not domineer and yet it 
dominates. 

Emerson felt that the America of his day 



THE CUTTING EDGE 225 

exhibited courage in many directions. It faced 
the material problems with an indomitable energy. 
But he felt a lack of the cutting edge in dealing 
with intellectual problems. The American schol- 
ars seemed to him tame-spirited. They were not 
sure of themselves, and were followers rather 
than leaders. 

In his oration before the Phi Beta Kappa 
Society of Harvard in 1837, he made a bold 
attack on the education of the day and ended with 
a plea for the courage of the intellect. The 
scholar must develop a heroism of his own. 

"In self trust are all the virtues comprehended. 
Free should the scholar be, — free and brave. 
Free even to the definition of freedom — without 
any hindrance which does not arise from his own 
constitution. Brave ; for fear is a thing which a 
scholar by his very function puts behind him. 
Fear always springs from ignorance." 

He does not belong to a protected class. 

"If he seeks a temporary peace by the diversion 
of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, 



226 EMERSON 

hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering 
bushes, peeping into microscopes and turning 
rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. 
So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear 
worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let 
him look into its eye, and search its nature, in- 
spect its origin — see the whelping of this lion — 
which lies no great way back ; he will then find in 
himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and 
extent ; he will have made his hands meet on the 
other side, and can henceforth defy it and pass 
on superior. The world is his who can see 
through its pretension. What deafness, what 
stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you 
behold is there only by sufferance, — by your suf- 
ferance. See it to be a lie and you have already 
dealt it a mortal blow." 

In 1876, in an address at the University of 
Virginia, Emerson returns to the same theme. 

"The scholar is the right hero. He is brave 
because he sees the omnipotence of that which 
inspires him. Is there only one courage and one 



THE CUTTING EDGE 227 

warfare? I cannot manage sword and rifle: can 
I not therefore be brave? I thought there were 
as many courages as men. Is an armed man the 
only hero? Is a man only the breach of a gun or 
the haft of a bowie knife? Men of thought fail 
in fighting down malignity, because they wear 
other armor than their own. Let them decline 
henceforward foreign methods and foreign cour- 
ages. Let them do that which they can do. Let 
them fight by their strength and not by their 
weakness. . . . 

"We have many revivals of religion. We have 
had once what was called a revival of Letters. I 
wish to see a revival of the human mind. To see 
men's sense of duty extend to the cherishing and 
use of their intellectual powers: their religion 
should go with their thought and hallow it." 

In his celebrated address to the Cambridge 
Divinity School, Emerson insisted on a spiritual 
courage which makes of religion an independent 
force. 

"Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone, 



228 EMERSON 

to refuse the good models, even those which are 
sacred to the imagination of men, and dare to 
love God without mediator or veil. Friends 
enough you will find who will hold up to your 
emulation, Wesleys and Oberlins, saints and 
prophets. Thank God for these good men, but 
say, 'I also am a man.' . . . 

"Yourself a new-born bard of the Holy Ghost, 
— cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint 
men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first 
only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure 
and money are nothing to you, — are not bandages 
over your eyes, that you cannot see, — but live 
with the privilege of the immeasurable mind. 

"Let us study the grand strokes of rectitude; 
a bold benevolence, an independence of friends, 
so that not the unjust wishes of those who love 
us shall impair our freedom, but we shall resist 
for truth's sake the freest flow of kindness, and 
appeal to sympathies far in advance ; and what is 
the highest form in which we know this beautiful 
element, that it is taken for granted, that the 



THE CUTTING EDGE 229 

right, the brave, the generous step will be taken 
by it, and nobody thinks of commending it." 

In the lines entitled "Worship" he returns to 

the same theme. The essence of real worship is 

spiritual courage. It is the "sword of the spirit," 

and it has a cutting edge. 

"This is he, who, felled by foes, 
Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows : 
He to captivity was sold, 
But him no prison-bars would hold : 
Though they sealed him in a rock, 
Mountain chains he can unlock : 
Thrown to lions for their meat, 
The crouching lion kissed his feet : 
Bound to the stake, no flames appalled, 
But arched o'er him an honouring vault. 
This is he men miscall Fate, 
Threading dark ways, arriving late, 
But ever coming in time to crown 
The truth, and hurl wrong-doers down. 
He is the oldest, and best known, 
More near than aught thou call'st thy own, 
Yet, greeted in another's eyes, 
Disconcerts with glad surprise. 
This is Jove, who, deaf to prayers, 
Floods with blessings unawares. 
Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line 
Severing rightly his from thine, 
Which is human, which divine." 



CHAPTER XXII 

TERMINUS 

"It is time to be old* 

To take in sail: — 

The god of bounds, 

Who sets to seas a shore, 

Came to me in his fatal rounds, 

And said: W0 more! 

No farther shoot 

Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root, 

Fancy departs: no more invent; 

Contract thy firmament 

To compass of a tent. 

There's not enough for this and that, 

Make thy option which of two; 

Economize the failing river, 

Not the less revere the Giver, 

Leave the many and hold the few. 

Timely wise accept the terms, 

Soften the fall with wary foot; 

A little while 

Still plan and smile, 

And, fault of novel germs, 

Mature the unf alien fruit. 

Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires, 

Bad husbands of their fires, 

Who, when they gave thee breath, 

Failed to bequeath 

230 



TERMINUS 231 

The needful sinew stark as once, 
The Baresark marrow to thy bones, 
But left a legacy of ebbing veins, 
Inconstant heat and nerveless reins, — 
Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb, 
Amid the gladiators, halt and numb! 

"As the bird trims her to the gale, 

I trim myself to the storm of time, 

I man the rudder, reef the sail, 

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: 

'Lowly faithful, banish fear, 

Right onward drive unharmed; 

The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 

And every wave is charmed! " 

TO the man of action the approach of age 
is dreaded because it means defeat. The 
strong man conscious of failing powers yields to 
one stronger than himself because younger, 

To Emerson, as a man thinking, the great 
weakness of age was to be found in its lack of 
faith in ideals. He saw old men who accepted 
the actual and denied the possibility of w T hat they 
had not been able to achieve. They praised the 
past time and looked askance at the threatening 
future. From the timidities of age which are 
often mistaken for wisdom, he asked to be de- 
livered, and his prayer was granted. 



232 EMERSON 

He had lived through a transition period in 
thought. Almost all his contemporaries, includ- 
ing those who were younger than himself, have 
left in their later utterances a record of disillu- 
sion. Carlyle, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Ten- 
nyson were inclined to sing dirges over a beauti- 
ful age of faith which had vanished before the 
advance of science. James Russell Lowell, with 
all his sturdy Americanism yielded to the same 
impulse. There was an acknowledgment of 
spiritual defeat. It might be expressed in gallant 
language, but the meaning was none the less 
clear. 

To Emerson this so-called disillusion was only 
another illusion. He speaks of the man "who 
during all his years of health has planted himself 
on the side of progress, but who as soon as he 
begins to die, checks his forward play, calls in 
his troops, and becomes conservative. All con- 
servatives are such from personal defects. They 
can only, like invalids, act on the defensive." 

One thing he resolved to do, to "obey the voice 



TERMINUS 233 

at eve obeyed at prime." In this he was emi- 
nently successful. 

Doctor Holmes speaks delicately and discrimi- 
natingly of "the decline of Emerson's working 
faculties." That exactly describes what hap- 
pened. The working faculties gradually failed, 
memory became less clear, but spiritual insight 
and loyalty to youthful ideals remained to the 
last 

While yet a young man, he had written down 
certain resolutions by which he wished to guide 
his life. Seldom has any one been more consist- 
ent in following his principles. 

'Thou shalt not profess that which thou dost 
not believe. 

'Thou shalt not heed the voice of man when it 
agrees not with the voice of God in thine own 
soul. 

"Thou shalt study and obey the laws of the 
Universe, and they will be thy fellow servants. 

"Nature shall be to thee as a symbol. The 



234 EMERSON 

life of the soul in conscious union with the In- 
finite shall be for thee the only real existence. 

"Teach men that each generation begins the 
world afresh, in perfect freedom; that the pres- 
ent is not the prisoner of the past, but that to-day 
holds captive all the yesterdays, to judge, to ac- 
cept, to reject their teachings, as they are shown 
by its own morning sun. 

"To thy fellow countrymen thou shalt preach 
the gospel of the New World, that here, here in 
America, is the home of man, that here is the 
promise of a new and more excellent social state 
than history has recorded." 

As to death, he had always been unafraid. 
When it came at the end of his seventy-ninth 
year, it found him in the mood that was habitual 
to him. He had long ago learned the lesson. 

"Teach me your mood, O patient stars ! 

Who climb each night the ancient sky, 
Leaving on space no shade, no scars, 

No trace of age, no fear to die." 

THE END 



BOOKS BY 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

From the list of HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
His Authorized Publishers 

EMERSON'S JOURNALS: 

Edited by Edward W. Emerson and Waldo Emerson 
Forbes. A chronological record of Emerson's life from 
1820 to 1876, published in a style uniform with the Cen- 
tenary Edition of his Works. Complete in ten volumes, 
which are sold either separately or as a set. 
"No more remarkable history of the human intellect in 
its untrammeled development has ever been written," 
said the Literary Digest of this intimate record of 
Emerson's spiritual and intellectual development. All 
Emerson's nobility of thought and felicity of expres- 
sion appear at their best in these volumes, while be- 
yond this they have a deep human interest as a fresh 
and living picture of the man and his period. From 
every point of view the Journals rank with the best of 
Emerson's writings, and without them his Works are 
incomplete. 

EMERSON'S WORKS : 

New Centenary Edition with portraits, biographical 
sketch, notes and index. Also published in the River- 
side Pocket Edition. Flexible leather bindings: 
Nature, Addresses, and Letters and Social Aims 

Lectures Poems 

Essays: First Series Lectures and Biographi- 

Essays : Second Series cal Sketches 

Representative Men Miscellanies 

English Traits Natural History of Intel- 

Conduct of Life lect and Other Papers 

Society and Solitude 

For information regarding the format and price of these 
and of the many other editions of Emerson's separate and 
collected writings, write to 

4 Park Street Houghton Mifflin Boston, Mass, 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Sept. 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 1 6066 
(724)779-2111 



